How a Web That Lost Its Way Can Find a New One

For most of these 30 years, the web has been able to transform the world in an almost radically open-source way.

Any user can take a "Look under the hood" in a way that wouldn't have been possible through a "Skinned" web, as it appeared in its earliest versions through service providers like America Online, CompuServe or Prodigy.

In its earliest days, the web rewarded those companies that drove active engagement, interactivity, decentralization and a customized experience that was a 180-degree change from the most popular medium that preceded it - the passive television.

The new kings are the services that control large portions of the front-end or back-end of the web, like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.

Like feudalism before it, which emerged as a means to bring some structure to society after the collapse of the Eastern Hemisphere's largest empires, the congealing of the web around these powers emerged from a need to bring structured usability to the technology's "Wild west."

Whether it's Amazon, Google or Facebook, users have to implicitly trust that these web overlords will do the right thing within their piece of the cloud when it comes to data security, and that they're actually up to the task.

We still have a long way to get there, but fixing the current power imbalance with the feudal lords of today's web will require more than just empty promises of large tech companies or the whims of government overseers that want to enable or disable those companies.

It will require a new effort to return to the principles that made the web such a transformative force in the first place.

Now we must build something for the modern web, a web where we can all participate in a free market of components that can be reused and remixed; components that enable chatting, videoconferencing, events, reservations and even payments.

Gregory Magarshak is the founder and CEO of QBIX, a decentralized platform for building open-source web and social apps to build communities.