Some Thoughts on the Open Web
January 21, 2026
“The Open Web” means several things to different people, depending on context, but recently discussions have focused on the Web’s Openness in terms of access to information — how easy it is to publish and obtain information without barriers there.
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In other words, we have to create an Internet where people want to publish content openly – for some definition of “open.” Doing that may challenge the assumptions we’ve made about the Web as well as what we want “open” to be. What’s worked before may no longer create the incentive structure that leads to the greatest amount of content available to the greatest number of people for the greatest number of purposes.
Mark Nottingham has been heavily involved in the development of standards like HTTP at the IETF for many years. We’ve also had the privilege of having him speak multiple times at our conferences. Here he brings together some thoughts about the open web and its future, which many are perhaps not without some reason expressing concerns about.
Publishers report very significant drop-off in referral traffic from search engines in the last year or so. Frontier model developers have freely used open web content to train their models, which have turned several of them into some of the biggest and certainly most fast-growing companies in history. So, what future does the open web have, and what can you do about it? Well worth a read here from Mark.
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