Submitted without commentary: "AI Might Be Our Best Shot At Taking Back The Open Web" by Mike Masnick https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/25/ai-might-be-our-best-shot-at-taking-back-the-open-web/
AI Might Be Our Best Shot At Taking Back The Open Web

I remember, pretty clearly, my excitement over the early World Wide Web. I had been on the internet for a year or two at that point, mostly using IRC, Usenet, and Gopher (along with email, naturall…

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@cwebber I don't understand people claiming they can self-host an independent "AI agent". It doesn't square with how I understand they work. It doesn't square with the immense data centers being built.

And while at first I'm sympathetic to his complaint about losing the open Web, he goes off the rails. You can still create web pages. It's just text. HTML tags are optional. He's fantasizing about singlehandedly competing with Microsoft or something.

@foolishowl @cwebber His description of CSS makes it sound like it is inscrutable, when browser dev tools like Inspect Element (the successor to "view source") have never been better...
@foolishowl @cwebber the more i think about this article the angrier i get. when i was a kid doing "view source" there was no integrated web IDE that would help you understand the DOM and even edit it in real time. what exists today is light years ahead of that. it's never been easier to learn about how websites work!

@vv @foolishowl @cwebber one of my favorite js packages is this, which brings inspection to mobile too!

https://eruda.liriliri.io/

On silly appending debug=true to any query string will pop it

Eruda - Console for Mobile Browsers | Eruda

Eruda Documentation

@tychi @foolishowl @cwebber this is amazing! Thanks