Something seems to be going on with the web. It seems to be heading towards a kind of endgame. For practical purposes there are only two web browser engines which most people use and they're both directly or indirectly controlled by Google. As I write this Google is busying itself trying to prevent ad blockers from working and without ad blocking the experience of browsing the modern web is some combination of insecure, annoying and occasionally horrifying. Targeted ads are like an unwelcome stalker who follows you around.

At the same time W3C - an organization already having profound flaws - appears to be handing over the definition of the HTML standard to Google. Mozilla I regard as being a proxy for Google because it's where they get their money from, and Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla and Google control WHATWG. Since Microsoft gave up making its own browser recently this really leaves Apple and Google as the new pilots of the HTML "living standard".

We can maybe see the future of the web in the form of what Google recently did with confidential emails in Gmail. If you're sending an email that way then it no longer gets transferred via the email protocol. Instead the email becomes merely a notification that something has happened on a Google server and you then have to log in to that server to read it. This is how open standards finally die, having been totally appropriated and subsumed under a superficial appearance of convenience and security theatricality.

A prediction is that in the early 2020s HTML is something delivered centrally by Google and optimized for ad delivery and metadata collection. There is a new era of utility computing in which Google data centers are the mainframes and the idea of personal computers being personal or decentralized is something quaint from the distant past. Unless Mozilla can really clean up their act I think they're heading towards a Netscape-like oblivion, although the codebase will live on and perhaps metamorphose into other things.

Now is a good time to reinvent the web and to revisit its most basic premises. Who should the web work for? Should it be just an ad delivery platform? Who should run the web and who should make the standards?