[joehewitt]

My point wasn't that Linux or Python or jQuery own their sectors. I responding to your claim that a single owner promotes stagnation.

It's important to distinguish the Internet from the collection of web technologies. The Internet is the thing that needs to remain open and uncontrolled.

[groby_b]

My point is that a central owner _without competition_ stifles innovation. There's only one web, so a central owner would be a bad thing - for the web. To quote your article "To thrive, HTML and company need what those other platforms have: a single source repository and a good owner to drive it"

The only other way to read that is that you're advocating splintering web technology into HTML-Moz, HTML-IE, HTML-Cr and so on. While that might make for a better developer experience for somebody who develops apps for _one_ of those platforms, it's a disaster in terms of interoperability. Which is kind of one of the key points of "The Web".

We were heading down that path for a while with browser-specific extensions, and it lead to large problems. For users, because they needed to have "just the right browser". And for many backend services, because actually extracting data from web pages required understanding all competing standards.

I care mostly about the users. The web of yore, with "best viewed with" stickers was a debacle in terms of UX.