The efforts of tech giants to gain control of and enclose the commons for extractive purposes have been clear to anyone who has been following the history of the Internet for at least the last decade, and the adopted strategies are varied in technique as they are in success, from Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (EEE) to monopolization and lock-in. What I want to talk about in this article is the war Google has been waging on XML for over a decade, why it matters that they’ve finally encroached themselves enough to get what they want, and what we can do to fight this. The smaller the number of players that have an actual influence on web, the better – it’s much easier for Google to find common ground with other megacorps like Apple or Microsoft than with smaller players, open source projects, and individuals who actually care about the openness of the web.
Author: Thom Holwerda
Published at: 2025-08-18 22:31:32
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