HTTP/2 Was Supposed to Fix the Web. Instead, It Created a New Monopoly.
HTTP/2 solved head-of-line blocking with multiplexing, but its binary framing made deep packet inspection harder, inadvertently consolidating power among massive CDN providers. The protocol that promised to democratize speed became a tollbooth, handing gatekeepers permanent control over web performance. The real bottleneck isn’t technical — it’s economic.