An impressive engineering task, for sure. But this shows how far we are from the fundamental ideas of the internet and the web, and instead fall back to the good ol' feudalism.
In France we had that thing called Minitel [0], which was heavily widespread before the WWW took off (I think it was given to everyone or something like that). The economic (and technical) model was completely different than the internet: you had a passive, stupid terminal, and you connected to a server that offers services for a fee. So you paid for connecting and using a service that could technically not be done on your own minitel (at least in the earlier version). Just like a browser that is completely stupid and allows you to connect to Facebook, Twitter, Google et al. for things you can't do on your own machine. You were depending on a third-party to do things.
We speak a lot about the Minitel model and how it is after all these years a model for all the big WWW players and ISPs to monetize their services. But it's not a common reference, so 'feudalism' works well in this context.
