There's no technical reason for this to be the case. ISPs adapted to the needs of the web, not the other way around.
> lack upload bandwidth
This is relative to each user. The vast majority wouldn't require much upload bandwidth, and there could be technical solutions to address this (caching nodes, data expiration, P2P, etc.).
The biggest technical challenges of large web services are because of the scale needed to support the large amount of users. If we had built services and tools around the inherent distributed nature of the web, centralization and all the problems caused by scale wouldn't be an issue.
> battery powered and intermittently operated
> mobile
Why should user data be highly available? If I'm physically unreachable or just want to be offline, shouldn't my data be unreachable as well? Besides, all of these can have technical solutions as well.
> Having a third, highly available, high upload capacity location to stage data between production and consumption wins
I'm not disagreeing, but a) this wouldn't be required by most users, and b) why couldn't this be under control of users as well? The fact no such (simple) solution exists today doesn't mean that it couldn't have gained traction back when browsers were getting adopted, and today we would've had a completely different web. Unfortunately incentives are turned on its head, users aren't educated about the harms of giving their data away because they've learned that it's the way the web works, we have to pass laws to protect user data, and a vocal minority of web developers have been swimming upstream and trying to undo the harms of centralization for decades with lackluster results.
The key functionality of the major tech platforms is to convey data to other people. Almost none of the data we give them is private or proprietary in the sense you’re suggesting. We only give it to them because we want e.g. our friends to have it. Now it is unfortunate that the service provider also gets it in the process, but that’s more an issue of end to end encryption than centralization per se. We can have highly centralized yet end to end encrypted platforms, like WhatsApp and Signal. We can also have highly decentralized platforms which are panopticons, like cryptocurrencies.
One of the main reasons we “hire” the platform companies to convey our data to other people rather than opening TCP sockets to each other directly is precisely async delivery. No one wants to use a social network where we can only see each other’s content if we’re using our laptops at the same time. Just make a phone call at that point.
Now maybe you could ask for federated, open standard queueing mechanisms. But we have one of those! It’s called SMTP, and it’s not really up to the needs of modern social applications. And maybe we could do something about that. But it’s also in the nature of federated open standards that are widely deployed to ossify. The other service that Facebook and Twitter are doing for you besides pub/sub is having the coordination and agency to update their own deployments over time, something that e.g. the set of all relevant email operators does not have.
Some websites even track exactly how you move your mouse and can have a pretty good guess of your age and they can track how many times you click something that doesn't do anything (apparently older people tend to zero in on buttons and click on things that aren't clickable more often. I heard this on older episodes of the Level1news on the Level1 Techs youtube channel, which I recommend listening to for tech news that might be up to a week out of date)
It's not just the data you obviously fill in yourself
and that's before considering cookies other than letting you auto login to a specific site you already logged in to before
Also, isn't Whatsapp owned by facebook now?
Don't trust facebook or anything they own
There's no technical reason for this to be the case. ISPs adapted to the needs of the web, not the other way around.
> lack upload bandwidth
This is relative to each user. The vast majority wouldn't require much upload bandwidth, and there could be technical solutions to address this (caching nodes, data expiration, P2P, etc.).
The biggest technical challenges of large web services are because of the scale needed to support the large amount of users. If we had built services and tools around the inherent distributed nature of the web, centralization and all the problems caused by scale wouldn't be an issue.
> battery powered and intermittently operated
> mobile
Why should user data be highly available? If I'm physically unreachable or just want to be offline, shouldn't my data be unreachable as well? Besides, all of these can have technical solutions as well.
> Having a third, highly available, high upload capacity location to stage data between production and consumption wins
I'm not disagreeing, but a) this wouldn't be required by most users, and b) why couldn't this be under control of users as well? The fact no such (simple) solution exists today doesn't mean that it couldn't have gained traction back when browsers were getting adopted, and today we would've had a completely different web. Unfortunately incentives are turned on its head, users aren't educated about the harms of giving their data away because they've learned that it's the way the web works, we have to pass laws to protect user data, and a vocal minority of web developers have been swimming upstream and trying to undo the harms of centralization for decades with lackluster results.