Thanks. I think we've always had the ability to publish content on the internet without relying on external services, and we still have. It's just not something that most people are willing to do, because it takes expertise and resources, and corporations can do it better by specializing in providing these kind of services. This is why people use them. For the same reason people don't usually make their own clothes, furniture, etc., either. Specialization and division of labour allows us to be much more productive and as a result enjoy a higher standard of living than we would if every individual had to produce everything they consume themself.

> The World Wide Web was initially designed to be decentralized, with the idea that anyone connecting to the internet could host a web server.

Yeah not really. If the Web was designed to be decentralized it would have used URNs as content identifiers instead of URLs. A URL is specific to a scheme (means of access) and authority (where to access).

A decentralized system would use URNs and any host that could service a request could return the resource. Once a resource was in "the Web" it would be accessible to future requests even if the original source went offline.

This sort of mirroring can be built on top of the Web (CDNs, traditional mirrors, etc) but it is not a foundational component. The authority providing a resource needs to online for that resource to be available.

The WWW is also not really decentralized anymore because 90% is hosted on one of a handful of hyperscalers. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Cloudflare.