The end of the Open Web isn't nigh
I was reading one of many trashy articles about the immanent demise of the open web, and thinking that this is mostly wrong.
https://www.anildash.com/2026/03/27/endgame-open-web
"too many of the players in the open ecosystem are still carrying on with business as usual, even though those tactics have been failing to stop big tech for years"
My ambition has never been to "stop" Big Tech. It has been to ignore them completely. This may be more or less successful, but over the years beginning in the mid 2000s I have often selected software or technology on the basis of whether or not it makes me more independent from big companies. I shouldn't need to care about whatever bullshit they happen to be doing this week. Their ridiculous extractive money schemes can rise and fall without me having to give a shit.
"What we are seeing is the application of the same market-crushing techniques that were used to displace entire industries with the rise of social media"
There was a lot of trepidation that the arrival of Meta (aka Facebook) in the fediverse with their deployment of Threads would be just such a "market-crushing" event. It was thought that the vast weight of unmoderated manure being indiscriminately dumped by Zuck would simply flatten the tiny pre-existing fediverse. But what actually happened is that I just blocked Meta at the Autonomous System level on my firewall, and then got on with my day. Comically easy, really. I think I can say now with some confidence that the arrival of Threads didn't destroy the fediverse - which is based on the open web standards which the article implies are immanently about to die - and it wasn't a "market-crushing" event because the open web is not a market.
The Big Tech people and their attached tech journalists like to believe that everything is a market, but it isn't. And no amount of spilled ink, churnalism, or LLM extrusions will make everything into a market. Me posting some cat photos on a HTML web page isn't a market. And if you think it is then I suggest that you take the matter up with your psychiatrist, because your own hangups are none of my business.
"are deeply experienced at dismantling any systems that have cultural or political power that they can't control"
This isn't really true. They have tried to take over some things, but just because they have money it does not mean that they are competent. In fact, the larger an organization becomes, the more incompetent it is. The idea that Big Tech companies are invulnerable and able to do anything with a high degree of competence is just flat out false.
"are being absolutely hammered by ill-behaved AI bots"
This part is true. LLM scrapers are a real annoyance on the Open Web. The biggest ones can typically be blocked via a combination of user agent and quotas though. It's not an insurmountable problem. It's also true that the mutually beneficial situation between search engines and websites is breaking down in a time of LLM summaries. The major search engines are shooting the goose that layed the golden egg, and that situation is definitely unsustanable.
"As publishers see the danger from AI bots expand, they retreat to putting more and more content behind either password protection or payment walls"
This is definitely happening, but it only applies to companies trying to directly profit from web content. Me putting up a cat photo on a HTML web page has no intent to make money out of it - it's just a form of self expression via cat expression. There is a dichotomy between the open web as a source of monetary income and the open web as a way of expressing yourself. The open web doesn't need to be all about the money (insert "where's the money Lebowski" meme), it can just be art or entertainment or other goofy stuff.
"Independent media based on open formats, like podcasts, are also under siege..."
Is another thing I don't agree with. There is literally nothing stopping me from putting up an mp3 podcast on a HTML web page. NOTHING! I could even add an RSS feed, potentially written by hand. I don't foresee that any dastardly thing which Big Tech could do would prevent this from happening. They could try to rip off the podcast by remixing it with generative AI, but there are ways to counter that, such as in the podcast itself always recite the genuine URL and encourage listeners to check that they are downloading from the authentic website.
"Open source software projects...are now beleaguered by constant slop code submissions"
This is true, but it only applies to the most popular open source projects. I have so far not seen any avalanche of slop pull requests on any of my projects. In the few cases where this is a problem I think things will need to be tightened up, and an obvious initial idea is to insist that patches be small and concise. LLM generated pull requests - according to what I've read - tend to be verbose and meandering, or so large that they're not reviewable. For larger projects, another strategy would be to ensure that submitters commit to maintain their own patches, which is something that an LLM won't do.
"A simple text file called robots.txt functioned for decades to describe the way that tools like search engines ought to behave"
robots.txt is from the "nice world" phase of of the web. By the 2000s it was already being ignored, and by about 2010 if you complained on a certain forum that your robots.txt file was being ignored by a search engine people would just laugh at you. My own server has seen many cases of robots.txt being ignored over the last 16 years. So this isn't a new problem and it's not an existential failure of the open web. robots.txt is from the unrealistically gentlemanly period of early web development, where everyone got along jolly nicely!
"Open source software licenses, which used to be a bedrock of the software community because they provide a consistent way of encoding a set of principles in the form of a legal contract, are now treated as a minor obstacle"
Amigos, I hate to break it to you, but there was never a time when open source licenses were perfectly obeyed as legally binding contracts. The number of GPL violations out there in the wild is staggering, and this was the case before LLMs or any more recent bullshit. Software Conservancy was only ever able to litigate a vanishingly tiny number of the total license violations. Just because you put a license on something does not magically mean that others will obey the license terms.
ACTION THIS DAY!
The main way that you can take action to support the open web is to put up a website of your own, actually use the open web (not just the Big Tech sites) and encourage other people to use the open web. It's not rocket science and need not involve donating large amounts of money to any particular organisation.