Nodes are about to destroy tech giants – from Apple to Google.

Although highly regarded even at the time of its writing, Marc Andreessen’s At the dawn of a decade when software could be valued in almost every aspect of modern life, Andreessen argued that every company is now a software company, whether it likes it or not.

Aligning the argument with many of the companies that were market leaders at the time, his ideas ultimately apply to companies that haven’t fully defined their market or that don’t yet exist but are creating billions in market share. Uber, Lyft, TikTok/ByteDance, Robinhood and Coinbase, among many others. If you’re going to be a unicorn in the 21st century, software is probably the key component to getting that horn.

The hidden engine behind this perfect disruption of modern economy and life is the emergence of true cloud computing and cloud giants, an industry that Andreessen himself pioneered while many inside and outside computing scoffed.

They were no laughing matter in the second decade of the 21st century. In the year In 2010, worldwide spending on cloud computing increased from $77 billion to $411 billion over Q2. It was the backbone that made everything accessible at the touch of a button on the computer in our pocket.

Related: With blockchain technology, Facebook and Twitter will soon become obsolete

But it came at a great cost to make many lives easier.

While the mobile-powered software revolution has made life as easy as the push of a button, like anything else, it has come with its own compromises. As software eats up the world, it has become the domain of a few, very large cloud hosting companies. Amazon, Google and Microsoft now account for 65% of the cloud hosting market.

This created a sort of shadow monopoly on the cloud hosting side. For example, especially with cloud hosting, hosts can turn off the service from the cloud, as Amazon has done with its popular social media service Parler. Parlor has been banned from the Apple App Store.

When it comes to the bigger issue at hand here, it’s okay to disagree with a service like Parlor. The incident showed that it only took two companies, Amazon and Apple, to knock a service offline, putting it out of business in a post-software world.

What happens when a service or developer implements a more innocuous Amazon policy or terms of service? The Internet has been drawn into a corner where it is no longer truly a marketplace of free ideas and free development, especially if that development is somehow perceived as a threat by companies like Amazon and Microsoft.

Nodes can build new worlds.

Just as Bitcoin (BTC) “broken” money and allowed people to think about exchanging value in new ways, new blockchain protocols have the opportunity to “break” data in a world consumed by software and oligopolistic companies, to think about that data exchange in new ways.

Web3 and the projects it spawns promise to redefine how information exists and is transmitted autonomously and transparently over the Internet. Decentralization-first and community-first ecosystems promise to return power to developers and, thereby, to the users of their decentralized applications (DApps) and software. This allows for a common framework that promotes best practices and economies of scale to compete with the large centralized entities on the Internet.

Related: The Federation is coming to Bored Monkeys from AXE Infinity.

This does not mean that we have yet reached a decentralized utopia. Even though decentralized systems are ostensibly “trustless” systems, trust still needs to be built into these systems for both developers and users. Whatever the downside of relying on companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple, they’ve built decades of trust, credibility, and familiarity that make it difficult for both developers and users to change things to a new way of doing things.

Part of building that trust is reinventing the incentive model that has supported the Internet for decades. In order for a new decentralized internet service to work, users would purchase nodes, and developers would best use those nodes to build software that would run on someone’s phone and be as easy to use as Uber or Wordle.

If the decentralized Web3 community can do this, we can take back the world consumed by software one node at a time.

This article is not intended for general information purposes and should not be construed as legal or investment advice. The views, ideas and opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.