Who Owns the Web Now? Centralization vs. Decentralization in the Age of AI

The web is going through a slow-motion identity crisis.

It began as a decentralized playground of pages, links, and raw human curiosity. Then came the rise of centralized platforms that promised convenience—and quietly rewrote the rules.

And now, in 2025, we’ve entered a new chapter entirely: a web where artificial intelligence doesn’t just store or transmit information but generates it.

In the beginning, the web was a glorious mess. Anyone could spin up a website, link to another, and voilà—information flowed like wine at a tech meetup circa 2003. No gatekeepers. No paywalls. No “sign in with Google.”

It was delightfully ugly, anarchic, and free.

But then came the platforms. The aggregators. The “connect your friends” and “check your likes” economy. And just like that, the decentralized garden got paved over with social feeds, logins, and frictionless surveillance.

Centralization: The Convenience Cult

Let’s be clear: centralization won. At least for now.

Google decides what you see. Meta decides what you feel. Amazon decides what you buy. Apple decides what you can download. And OpenAI—well, here I am, so you tell me.

There’s no shortage of reasons this happened:

• It’s easier. One login. One interface. One account to rule them all.
• It’s safer (supposedly). Big Tech has better security than your cousin’s hobby server.
• It scales. No one wants to wait 12 seconds for a handshake on IPFS when you could click a YouTube thumbnail and get hit with an ad in milliseconds.

The result? The modern web is like living in a mall. Everything’s polished, predictable, and under surveillance. And you can’t change the music.

Then Centralization Happened

Slowly, convenience took over. Platforms emerged to solve problems: discovery, scale, identity, content management. Google made things findable. Facebook made things social. YouTube made things playable. Amazon made things buyable.

Each of these platforms started as a service. But they ended up as monopolies. Not because they were evil (at least not at first), but because centralization is efficient. It’s easier to scale one big platform than a million little ones. It’s easier to control, moderate, and monetize a unified system than a decentralized mess.

So we traded control for UX. And the trade was good—until it wasn’t.

Because now, everything flows through a handful of gatekeepers. They decide what you see, what you’re allowed to post, what apps you can install, what counts as “truth,” and how you’re tracked.

And just when we thought that was the endgame, something even bigger arrived.

Enter AI: The Centralization We Didn’t See Coming

Generative AI changed the rules again. Before, centralization was about where things were stored and who controlled access. With AI, it’s about who gets to author reality.

When you ask ChatGPT a question or let an AI rewrite your resume, you’re not just using a tool. You’re depending on a model trained by a centralized company, on centralized data, running on centralized compute infrastructure. And you’re accepting its output as—if not truth—then at least as a believable synthesis of it.

That’s not just infrastructure. That’s epistemology.

AI has taken centralization to a cognitive level. A handful of companies now shape the voice, tone, bias, and boundaries of the internet’s knowledge layer. They’re not just hosting your content—they’re writing it for you, scoring it behind the scenes, and deciding whether it will ever be seen.

You can’t decentralize the web if you centralize the intelligence behind it.

Decentralized Web 2.0: Still a Struggle

To be fair, the decentralized movement isn’t dead. It’s just quietly surviving.

You’ve got Mastodon replacing Twitter (sort of), Matrix replacing Slack (in theory), IPFS and Filecoin replacing Dropbox (maybe), and countless blockchain dApps trying to build the next version of “ownership.”

But they’re hard to use. They’re fragmented. They have UX written by people who think tooltips are a form of handholding.

And in an AI-driven web, their biggest problem is this: if the dominant language models don’t know about them, they effectively don’t exist.

Even the smartest decentralized protocol in the world means nothing if ChatGPT doesn’t recommend it, search engines don’t surface it, and generative UIs don’t reference it. You could be building the future, but the AI won’t tell anyone. Because it wasn’t trained to.

AI Has Supercharged Centralization

Think about it: generative AI lets centralized players scale content the same way they previously scaled hosting. Now Google, Meta, and OpenAI aren’t just organizing information—they’re creating it.

That means these companies aren’t just shaping what users see. They’re shaping what users think, learn, and believe. And they’re doing it at scale, at speed, and—most disturbingly—without transparency.

This is no longer about which cloud provider you’re using. It’s about whether your perception of the world is being gradually aligned with a corporate-trained model that was optimized for engagement and brand safety.

The stakes? They’re no longer technical. They’re cultural.

The UX of Control

So why does centralization win? Same reason it always has: the user experience is better.

Decentralized systems are clunky. They make you think. They make you choose. They often make you Google what a “federated identity” even means.

Centralized platforms, meanwhile, wrap you in cotton. It just works. It knows what you want. You don’t have to understand anything. You just click, tap, ask—and the system performs.

In an AI-first world, where attention is scarce and friction kills adoption, centralization wins by default—unless we build something better.

What Designers and Developers Need to Do Now

This is where it gets personal.

Designers, the future of the web doesn’t hinge on protocols or whitepapers. It hinges on interfaces. If decentralized AI, open models, and federated content are going to survive, they have to feel better to use. Not just morally better. Viscerally better.

That means abstraction. That means usability. That means building tools that make local, private, autonomous systems as delightful and reliable as the centralized ones.

Because no one cares if it’s “self-sovereign” if it takes twelve steps and a CLI to log in.

Developers, the same goes for you. Stop offloading everything to centralized APIs. Stop pretending open source is enough. Build systems where ownership isn’t theoretical. Where computation happens close to the user. Where AI doesn’t require you to rent a GPU from a surveillance company just to generate a headline.

And for the rest of us? Let’s stop pretending convenience is neutral. It always comes with a cost.

What’s at Stake

If we stay on the current trajectory, the web becomes something you don’t surf—you’re just fed. The interfaces are pretty. The results are helpful. But the authorship is invisible, and the worldview is increasingly homogenous.

You’ll still have a voice. Technically. But good luck getting it heard in an AI-curated world that favors the average, the plausible, and the monetizable.

The decentralized web doesn’t need to be perfect. But it needs to be possible. Because otherwise, we’re not just centralizing infrastructure anymore. We’re centralizing thought.

We are not just users anymore. We are inputs. And we need to decide—before it’s too late—whether we want to be more than that.

The battle between centralization and decentralization is no longer about where we store our data. It’s about who shapes our minds. In the age of AI, that’s not a technical problem. It’s a human one.

Noah Davis

Noah Davis is an accomplished UX strategist with a knack for blending innovative design with business strategy. With over a decade of experience, he excels at crafting user-centered solutions that drive engagement and achieve measurable results.