Open Web Destroyed by Centibillionaires, Says Anil Dash of Blogging Fame
Blogging fanatics and earlier bloggers may have heard of Anil Dash, who had many valuable insights about the Web (some have gone 'viral' over the past 2-3 decades). Blogging was going through its 'prime years' about 20 years ago. Then social control media was fast becoming a "thing".
Dash warns of threats to the Open Web in a new blog post which says:
Now, the centibillionaires have begun their final assault on the last, best parts of what's still open, and likely won't rest until they've either brought all of the independent and noncommercial parts of the Internet under their control, or destroyed them. Whether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months. Even though there have always been threats to openness on the web, the stakes have never been higher than they are this time.
Right now, 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. I don't say this lightly: it looks to me like 2026 is the year that decides whether the open web as we know it will survive at all, and we have to fight like the threat is existential. Because it is.
They're already managed to remove RSS support from all the major browsers. They also restrict many things people can do on the Web.
It should be noted that technical sites or geeks' sites have an advantage; outside social control media they stand a chance of finding people who know how to use Gemini clients, RSS feeds etc. There's more to the Net than "apps" and addictive "hubs". But when companies like Mozilla actively promote slop instead of healthy "consumption" of news they help rewrite people's material through GAFAM lenses (LLMs, a form of implicit censorship) while contributing to bloat and proprietary back-ends.
The Web as we know it is being sabotaged; Gemini clients and curated links are one way to dodge slop, but most people just "follow the norm" and become absorbed in "centibillionaires"-controlled propaganda cages. All the "major" social control media (YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Ex-Twitter etc.) is like that. █
Image source: Anil Dash
