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.