The web was always about redistribution of power. Let's bring that back.

Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality

The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending

It's time to rebuild the web

The web was never supposed to be a few walled gardens of concentrated content owned by a few major publishers; it was supposed to be a cacophony of different sites and voices.

Framing to Grow the Open Social Web and Serve Democratic Freedoms – Position Paper / Richard Reisman

Framing to Grow the Open Social Web and Serve Democratic Freedoms – Position Paper Richard Reisman (Discussion Draft 2/13/26) For FediForum Un-Workshop March 2, 2026 Growing the usage and functionality of the social web to meet the needs of humanity requires a broadened framing of the task and ...

Decentralizing the Economic Power of the Web (A Reading List)

We recently hosted a panel discussion as part of our MozFest’s Dialogues & Debates series focused on interrogating the web’s reigning business model — d…

Eaten by the Internet

This book makes internet infrastructure visible as a force of political power, which is transforming the social world, from the bottom up—through fifteen chapters contributed by a global set of researchers, activists, and techies. We are living a unique moment: internet technologies are the default infrastructure for society, not just how we communicate but also how we organise our social life, politics, and economy, all the way down to our material environments, like cities. Our world is eaten by the internet. This means that those who control the internet control the bounds of public speech, economic production, social cohesion, and politics, making its infrastructure a core political terrain in the networked age. The book’s chapters cover a wide set of topics, spanning from the global politics of content moderation by internet infrastructure to the colonialism inherent in the race to plug the moon, from the harms wrought by blockchain companies in rural America to the particularities of online censorship across Asia. The chapters take on thorny topics, discussing power consolidation in the advertisement and cloud industry, the role of internet infrastructure in the war in Ukraine, and tech’s environmental impact—amongst others. In doing so, this book roots contemporary technology debates in the politics of internet infrastructure and urges us to ask how can we ensure our infrastructures sustain us, rather than consume us?

The Missing Building Blocks of the Web

At a time when millions are losing trust in the the web’s biggest sites, it’s worth revisiting the idea that the web was supposed to be…

Power in the Age of the Feudal Internet - CoLab

PROPOSITION

Sustainable Web Manifesto

“If the Internet was a country, it would be the 13th largest polluter”

Reweaving the web

A slew of startups is trying to decentralise the online world

Is Bluesky's "Decentralization" Real? – The Empty Promise of DIDs and the Path to a WordPress-Style Ecosystem - Nightflight

We can have a different web

Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.

Web Browsers, AI, and the Politics of Media Power

The left keeps building media strategies on top of platforms built to undermine them. As browsers are rebuilt for mass surveillance and manipulation, the systems that decide what people see and who gets heard are being rewritten without us. Control over the browser is control over political reality.

Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality - Clay Shirky

Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality.

My journey to the heart of the forgotten internet

Slowly but surely, huge swaths of the internet are vanishing. But the artefacts of the early web are still out there, and they have lessons for the future.

The web can be weaponised – and we can't count on big tech to stop it | Tim Berners-Lee

It’s dangerous having a handful of companies control how ideas and opinions are shared. A regulator may be needed