Slashdot Mirror
Towards a Permission-Based Web
On his blog over at RedMonk, analyst James Governor looks at the walled garden we seem to be moving into, and possible cracks in the wall. "As we rush to purchase Apple products and services on Cupertino’s monochrome treadmill of shiny shiny, I can’t help thinking the open web community is losing something vital — a commitment to net neutrality and platform openness. If a single company can decide what plays on the network and what does not, in arbitrary fashion, how can that be net neutrality? ... Is the AppStore a neutral network? Should it be? Is Comcast, the company net neutrality proponents love to hate, really the only company we should be wary of? Pipe level neutrality is surely only one layer of a stack. The wider market always chooses proprietary wrappers — every technology wave is co-opted by a master packager. Success in the IT industry has always been about packaging — doing the best job of packaging technologies as they emerge. Twas ever thus." Governor ends his essay with an optimistic look at Android, which he says "potentially fragments The Permission Based Web, and associated data ownership-based business models."
Walking into a room and locking the door isn't being "locked in". Apple has not pulled a bait-and-switch. Everyone is free to know exactly what they are buying before they do so. There's absolutely nothing morally wrong about what Apple has done.
You are all full of hate.
All this talk about the AppStore misses the point. You're dealing with handset manufacturers. They've always been BDSM. The real walled garden is Facebook, Twitter, and yes Google. (All though to their credit, Google did announce some form of data portability, but I wonder about its practicality.) It's cloud applications (whatever those are). It's the fact that for a variety of our personal tasks now, we must rely on others to run them. The data has gotten too big, and we've lost control.
If you think Google is going to rescue you from Apple, you're sorely mistaken. Apple is a niche. Google is the new Microsoft. They're the behemoth that is looking to control the world now. Haven't you ever wondered what Google Toolbar, GMail, GoogleApps, Wave and all the like are for? They're to slurp everything into their datacenter and then turn around and sell you things.
We've moved from from open standard, and ubiquitous email to writing on walls on Facebook. What did it give us? Twitter is popular for some reason, but not only are you arbitrarily limited to 140 chars, but all your status updates get locked away. Why are photos being uploaded back behind walls where are data checks in, but never checks out. Supposably it's more convenient, but it's nothing that RSS couldn't give you. Maybe there needed to be some sort of service that provided RSS for the masses, a turn key simple blog and photo gallery in one place, but it's all locked away, and I suspect we lost something. And yet if we think about leaving, we are giving up the ease of communicating with our more distant social network.
Facebook is here to stay, and I suspect that our data will never be the same.