[jillesvangurp]

I think the open web always was a fringe thing. It never went away, it's still there in some form and it's about the same size it always was and mainly consists of a relatively small group of people taking the effort to communicate outside mainstream channels. It's just that at some point the rest of the planet became part of the web and it did not take long for regulators to notice that. Before that, the open web was all there was. But once the likes of AOL, MySpace, and eventually Facebook and others dragged in the rest of the planet it stopped being open pretty quickly.

The challenge for open web proponents has always been compelling the masses to join their open network. The history of the internet is pretty much other things happening than what open web proponents advertise. Everybody can have their own website became everybody has a myspace profile, and later a facebook profile. You see the same with attempts at creating a decentralized web right now. Same crowd, same ideals, same level of indifference from everybody else. It's not dying, but also not on any kind of path of addressing this.