By Janus Boye

The conversations shaping the future of the web are shifting.

At CloudFest last week in Germany, with its sheer scale, that shift became easier to see. For years, the industry has optimised for scale. Bigger platforms, more integrations, faster delivery. That logic still dominates much of what we see and how decisions are made.

Yet something more fundamental is emerging underneath. The real change is structural. It is about who controls the systems we depend on, how ecosystems are governed, and where value is created. Alongside this, there are early signs of a different kind of collaboration taking shape, particularly in open source, where initiatives like FAIR point to new ways of organising shared responsibility, and new ways to create and capture value within the ecosystem.

CloudFest was new to me this year. It is also hard to ignore the scale. The conference takes over an entire theme park, Europa Park, with thousands of people moving between sessions and conversations.

What stood out, however, was not just the size, but the direction of the conversations. In sessions, hallway discussions, and informal exchanges throughout the week, the same pattern kept resurfacing.

To understand what is changing, it helps to start with the signals already visible.

The shift is happening right now

Several signals are converging at the same time. In one of my presentations, I compared this to the visible change a few decades ago from D Mark to the Euro. The shift right now is almost equally visible, but driven by in particular these two trends:

AI is changing expectations around how content is created, delivered, and consumed
Digital sovereignty is moving from a niche concern to a mainstream topic. Platforms are being redesigned, often in response to both.

Individually, these shifts are big on their own. Together, they totally change much of what we take for granted. The industry is not simply evolving, it is entering a transition where underlying assumptions are being reconsidered.

something about budgets being available for these things..