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> AWS, Heroku, and other platforms make it possible to develop and host a complete web application for free and to make it publicly available on the Internet for anyone to use for free.

I have been running complete web applications from home for free for anyone to use for a long time. That is what the web is about - you don't need a dedicated, centralized host. Anyone can connect to it and anyone can run servers on it. It isn't terribly difficult to do, nor costly, I do it on a budget residential broadband connection.

Granted, it might not scale to millions of users, but neither will heroku's or AWS's free/low-cost tiers either.

Is it within the terms of service for your ISP to do so? I was always under the impression that if your provider caught you trying to do that they'd lock you out and make you get a business plan, but I suppose I never took the time to figure out an answer for sure.

My ISP's terms of service prohibit commercial use, but I don't view anything I do there as commercial (most people who play with my home hosted apps or read my blog are essentially friends anyway...), and after 11 years, nobody from the cable company has complained about my bandwidth/traffic patterns either.

Besides, even if the ISP had an arbitrary restriction, I think that runs afoul of net neutrality rules and may be illegal now in the US.

> Is it within the terms of service for your ISP to do so? I

That depends on which ISP you choose.

It is not really our concern what you do with your internet connection any more than it is the concern of the power company what you do with the electricity they supply ... However, we ask that you do not use the service for anything illegal

http://aa.net.uk/legal-aup.html

These types of restrictions are exactly what refute the grandparent's claim that the web is more open today. Legislation, copyright, centralization and consolidation of services (ISP, cloud applications, cloud servers) have certainly made the Internet more powerful, but these trends have weakened what the Web was really about, as stated in the parent.

For me one of the greatest times of freedom was during the life of Geocities. This was actually the only time I had a website, and I was in middle school. Sure, there was a lot less people on the Internet, but it was a very wild wild west atmosphere and I feel like a larger portion of the users created their own home pages than today. Malicious parties were not as widespread and powerful, and there was overall not so much control over everything. I was also using Napster at this time.

I've studied computer engineering and I've still had a hard time having the feeling / spirit of freedom and ease of contributing to the Internet as I did back then. Maybe it's because I'm not creative anymore, or because I'm too cheap to pay for or too disinterested in putting my content onto services, or because there's a lot more to worry about with running your own server, or because there's too much visibility/scrutiny/copyright enforcement. Doesn't have the same feeling of openness as back then.

More reasons why you do not have your own homepage ... discoverability: If there are no one linking to your webpage you do not exist. It's as Google broke the web by making a too good search engine. Most sites now a days is just a dead end, while web sites used to have lots of links that let you dig deeper into the subject. And instead of finding ten quality and peer-reviewed articles you now find thousand of crappy search-optimized articles.

Then there's the lock-in again. Instead of writing your web sites in pure HTML, they are now locked inside a database in some content management system. You can't simply move to another provider.

Also there's the domain names, or rather web addresses, they are too damn expensive. There need to be a free top level domain name so that web addresses stay longer then a year. Maybe only allow ten free domains per person to prevent hoarding.

> Also there's the domain names, or rather web addresses, they are too damn expensive.

Really ? A year of a .com, .net, .org costs less then monthly internet bill.

Not to mention there have been many services offering subdomains of a rich domain list in the past.

I used them in the beginning of high school before finally buying a .net, putting it on a home DNS server with IPv6 tunnel and gain "l33t" points on IRC with a custom hostname.

The domain cost is probably 90% of what it costs to host a web site. The problem with sub-domains is you have a weaker ownership and much higher risk compared to owning a .com domain, it's not like Verisign will shut down anytime soon and take all .com domains with them. I would be surprised if the sub domain you used in high-school still exists and links to your webpage. I also used to run a few web pages on free hosting in high-school, but they have been shut down a long time ago, so the links no longer works. But at least I still have some of the source code saved. After posting I found the .free TLD. I hope it will be like Letsenccrypt, but easier.

>The only thing Facebook has done that the author seems to object to is to be extraordinarily, unprecedentedly successful.

Where does he say that?

You just described an open web and then somehow attributed all of that to Facebook. If Facebook were to replace the Internet like Zuckerberg would love to do then none of the things you described would still be possible.

>There are a lot of things I find toxic about Facebook

Sir Tim and I agree with you on that.

People seem to forget that freedom isn't always used the way you want it to be used. If it were, it would be called "control".

We may be free to travel the world. But our freedom includes the right to create a space that we control. And invite in those we choose and do things our own way.

That's what I do at my house. Don't you?

And when decide you want to expand your house so that it is coterminous with the world, the cases will be parallel.

> the web is more open now than it's ever been.

mmm... How are you measuring that?

> Everything you need to build a web application like Facebook is free to try and use.

That is not what is being discussed. However, you have a HUGE disadvantage that is growing exponentially.

Thats a terrible argument from my perspective.

In India we are fighting, and quite possibly going to lose the Net Neutrality battle to Facebook and our Homegrown telecoms.

The number of people who still don't have internet access far dwarfs the number of people who are online right now.

We've constantly being losing space to walled gardens from the day that the appstore showed it was profitable.

Recently it was shown that even Google was tacitly supporting groups on the anti-neutrality side of the debate.

Most of those tutorials are in English, the majority of the people who will come online will not use that as a language.

Someone can and will translate those tutorials, and lock it behind a wall.

The openness of the web is under assault, and Facebook and telecoms are actively working to convert their wealth into political power to ensure that their moats are technological, behavioral and regulatory.

Its beyond 'worrisome' and straight up at frightening.

Less like a silo, and more of flytrap for the unwary and unprepared.