News Sir Tim Berners-Lee warns of the Web's 'dysfunctions'

At a fundamental level, the biggest issue facing the internet in general is the replacement of protocols with services.

For example:
- Email. You can pick your email client, you can pick your email host, but everyone talks to everyone else on a shared protocol and you can switch clients and hosts as needed (muddied slightly if you use a domain you do not own yourself).
- Chat: You can pick your IRC client, you can pick your IRC server, and everyone talks on the same protocol. You can point your IRC client at any server you want, and a server will accept any compliant client.
- Websites: You can pick your browser, you can pick your host server, and yaddah yaddah yaddah you get the point.

But then some bright spark thought "hey, lets just make everything web-based, then nobody needs to agree on a new protocol!" and the idea was very attractive. The downside is that you are now locked into a single service provider effectively running a single-vendor protocol but obfuscated by "but it's on the internet, and that's an open protocol!". The situation has gotten to such heights of ridiculous for companies like IFTTT to pop up: a middleman that exists solely as a service to let your service talk to another service because none of them can do so without an additional song and dance, and of course somebody ends up having to pay for the privilege.