I'm not saying "web" would be better if it was more centralized. WWW is optimal in the sense that it sits directly on top internet protocols, i.e. it just defines how to use TCP/IP to retrieve a document.
I think in the "ideal world" we could get higher-level protocols on top of WWW, perhaps offering document persistence and global search. E.g. they could function in a federated way.
We had a lot of interesting experiments -- Freenet, bittorrent, IPFS, "Semantic Web", ActivityPub -- but we haven't seen anything which directly competes with centralized services. Of course, it is hard to compete with well-capitalized companies. But also there might be over-reliance on "startups". As Peter Thiel explained, "startups" generally want to build monopolies, as you can't really make money by offering a commodity. So it's not really surprising that Google dropped support for XMPP, for example - they'd rather keep users within the ecosystem.
I think in the "ideal world" we could get higher-level protocols on top of WWW, perhaps offering document persistence and global search. E.g. they could function in a federated way.
We had a lot of interesting experiments -- Freenet, bittorrent, IPFS, "Semantic Web", ActivityPub -- but we haven't seen anything which directly competes with centralized services. Of course, it is hard to compete with well-capitalized companies. But also there might be over-reliance on "startups". As Peter Thiel explained, "startups" generally want to build monopolies, as you can't really make money by offering a commodity. So it's not really surprising that Google dropped support for XMPP, for example - they'd rather keep users within the ecosystem.