In recent news, Google has put forth a proposal known as the "Web Environment Integrity Explainer", authored by four of its engineers. On the surface, it
This shouldn't be surprising to anyone. And it's a death knell of the internet as we know it. It won't be today or tomorrow, but slowly, over the next few years, expect surface level internet services to be extremely user unfriendly. I expect normies to just accept their fate and pay access fees to literally every website and service they use, while more tech savvy or explorative people might find their way to federated spaces or Usenet, etc.
The silver lining here might also be that the internet that we knew and loved 25 years ago might actually reappear. The 'other' stuff would just become background noise to the ones 'in the know'.
I sometimes wonder if this would be best outcome. Rather than spending so much effort trying to fight for the internet at large, those of us “in the know” just take our balls and go play in our own corner.
The fediverse might be a test of this it continues to survive but never turns mainstream.
There is an author - Tad Williams, who wrote the "Otherland" series. One of the chapters has the some of the main ensemble going to "treehouse" - aka what happened in this universe when the nerds, geeks and techno wizards took their ball and went home.
The series as a whole is interesting if you like sci-fi. That chapter however seems more and more on the nose the older I get.