Who Will Win Control of the Web?

Barence writes "Control of the web is up for grabs. Each of the big three computing companies – Microsoft, Apple and Google – has its own radically different vision to promote, as does the world's biggest creative software company, Adobe. And HTML itself is changing, too. This article examines the case for each of the contenders in the war of the web and, with the help of industry experts, assesses which – if any – is most likely to emerge as victor."

Comments

How do we make sure?

[countertrolling]

How do we make sure that nobody "controls" the web?

Re:How do we make sure?

[ArcherB]

How do we make sure that nobody "controls" the web?

Looks to me that the web is falling under the control of DHS. We all know how much a threat bit-torrent search engines are to national security.

If this would have happened three years ago, Slash would have posted this article three times with 750 comments each talking about how Bush is a tyrant trying to seize and solidify power. Now in 2010, not a peep.

Re:How do we make sure?

[girlintraining]

How do we make sure that nobody "controls" the web?

Make it unprofitable.

Re:How do we make sure?

[Mitchell314]

How do we make sure that nobody "controls" the web?

Make it unprofitable.

So . . . you want the government to manage it? :D

Re:How do we make sure?

[c1ay]

Continue supporting open source solutions. As long as Unix/Linux OSes remain the dominant systems and Apache the dominant server then proprietary solutions will never win. The attempt of proprietary vendors to win is exactly what drives the community to fork and maintain open source. In the same way that BSD gave birth to FreeBSD, Open Office gave birth to Libre Office. I suspect Oracle will eventually force MySQL to fork in order to remain open but it has the momentum now to remain the dominant web DB. Freedom will prevail and that is what will make sure no one entity controls the web.

Re:How do we make sure?

[mellon]

Um. The title is absurd. You don't "control the web" by adopting open standards. None of these three is "controlling the web." If you want to look for someone controlling the web, look at all the legislation going around allowing governments to seize domain names, and treat traffic differently based on its source, and shut down peoples' access to the web based on mere allegations. That's "controlling the web."

Re:How do we make sure?

[jc42]

How do we make sure that nobody "controls" the web?

Make it unprofitable.

So . . . you want the government to manage it? :D

Well, the US government did fund about 99% of its development, mainly through (D)ARPA, the (Defense) Advanced Research Projects Agency. That seems to have worked pretty well. Furthermore, ARPA left most of the development to the academic community, which does a fairly good job of "unprofitable". They were interested in capability, not profits. The military took what they considered useful from what the academics developed, used it to build their own Internet with very few connections to the academic Internet, and left the academics to continue to play with their big, useful toy.

OTOH, since the Internet was commercialized, we see a lot of what we're talking about here: The primary interest of the for-profit world is maximizing their income from the Internet, while minimizing development and support costs. This is why, for example, it has taken so long to get wireless Internet. It has been built by the phone companies, whose interests lie in creating exclusive "walled gardens", in which they have control over what software you are allowed to run, because they want you to pay for every little thing (even when its authors are giving it out free). They also seriously limit independent developers, because they want you to pay the phone companies for the software, not the developers. (Sorta like how the music industry has so successfully claimed 99% of the income, given a small part to the top "artists", and given the rest nothing.)

If history is any guide, we should conclude that strict government control and management of the Internet is the right way to go, at least in countries where the government (or the military ;-) has the good sense to continue to view it as an academic playground. And, as ARPA did during the early development, we should restrict the corporate world to the role of suppliers of the components, with no control of what we do with the network.

The growing talk of corporate monopolies running big chunks of the Internet should be a serious warning to all of us. To see why, look at the phone system back when in the US and many other countries, you could only attach hardware purchased or leased from the phone companies to your phone line. For a century, this produced glacially-slow development. Then, in the US and a few other countries, the government changed the rules, and gave customers permission to attach "foreign" gadgets (that met minimum interface requirements) to their phone lines. Within only a few years, there was an explosion of new capabilities. This is what you'd expect when you enable competition, of course. But you can't have competition and development if your connection is controlled by a monopoly that's allowed to control how you can use their system. In the US, this is pretty much the situation with wireless phones right now, and as a result, the wireless Internet is seriously crippled here.

Phrases like "net neutrality" and "control of the Web" should be warnings to all of us that the corporate world is trying to take control and limit our use of the Internet to only what we've explicitly paid them for. Look at the anti-competitive ways that Apple's App Store imposes. Ask yourself whether you want Apple or any of the other big players to impose rules like that on all the independent software developers out there. Ask yourself whether you want one big "winner" to control the Internet like AT&T did the phone system for a century, and block almost all further progress.

This is a case where the classical "incompetence" of the government has worked to our advantage. Maybe we should keep it that way. Without it, we'd never have had the Internet. We'd only have a flock of small, vendor-specific networks. You'd only be able to communicate with people and sites approved of by your

Re:How do we make sure?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a hard time imagining that most people, who give politics serious thought, would run on that warped analysis of decision making.

All of my left leaning friends believe that reason is as defined in the video: concious, logical, unemossional, etc.
However, they also understand that a lot of people make quick decisions by relying on unconcious feelings. They understand the concepts of confirmation bias and social conditioning. They understand the fundamentals of human learning.

Let me repeat:
All of my friends understand how beliefs are formed, but they still believe that reason can prevail through concious, universal, logical, unemossional, etc means. And in fact, if you think deeply about a subject, you are bound to come to this ideal level of reason.

Answer

[girlintraining]

Who Will Win Control of the Web?

You and I, silly people. Why are we deluding ourselves into believing only massive multinational companies can control the web, or that the government can control the internet, etc.? They are granted power because we give it to them.

If each of you here went over to 10 people's homes and set them up on something like Tor, and showed them how to protect their privacy and avoid malware and advertisement, executives everywhere would be protesting in front of Congress to stop those goddamned citizens from ruining their perfectly profitable business built on exploiting them. That, people, is power. And it is yours, not theirs.

Re:Answer

[Amorymeltzer]

That's a big if, though. The power structure of the world has and will always be a pyramid, and those on the bottom have always had the strength and numbers to overthrow those above it, yet a look at the past 20 years in Myanmar/Burma and Argentina are enough to show you that people still, after thousands of years, aren't always quick to do it. Something like the Magna Carta only happens so often, but when it does it's glorious. The real power in that document wasn't the power of the peasants or even the nobles to hold the monarchy accountable - after all, we've always had pitchforks - it was the establishment of an early set of bureaucracy. Companies follow rules for profit, the easiest way to win is just to play their game. Net neutrality is a good example of that - use an established bureaucracy against them. It's much easier to effect change as a small group of vocal lobbyists than a massive uprising. The average citizen wants their coffee and paper, to watch the game, and for the kids to behave. A technowhatsit spat over standards is about as boring as John Kerry's stump speech (that joke is six years old already).

Re:The Gov't

[girlintraining]

Unfortunately the US government (at least in the US) has pulled ahead in terms of controlling the internet via seizure:

They've pulled ahead in terms of controlling one network resource: DNS. That does not mean control of the internet.

Oh?

[Xacid]

I'm pretty much talking out my ass but what is all this "control the web" nonsense? Isn't that precisely what we're 100% against?

And perhaps it's semantics + bad journalism. What they seem to be really asking - "whose technologies will gain the highest presence on the web?"

But that's not really "control" by any means.

Car analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Who will win the battle for control of the roads?

Some car guy investigates the war between Toyota, General motors, Ford and BMW for road domination.

In the 90 years since Henry Ford produced the first affordable car, our expectations of what the automobile can deliver have changed beyond all recognition. However, the core experience of running an internal combustion engine has remained largely intact. Now that’s all set to change.

Blah, blah, blah, six pages...

Until the dust settles, it’s too early to say which company is likely to emerge triumphant. The only safe prediction is that there will be plenty more twists, turns, alliances and battles to come before the war is finally decided.

Missing the point

[joepress99]

The web should be renamed the ebb for ebb and flow.
Right now, Facebook is taking over the web.
Soon, people will realize Facebook is just AOL without the free coasters.
It will be on to the next BIG thing.

Re:Missing the point

[hey]

I hope Facebook dies.

Re:why are its users so stupid?

[cheebie]

I'm one of those engineers.

I ran windows for a long time and got sick of the crappy OS and security so poor 50% of the CPU power is dedicated to preventing me from getting hacked.

Then I ran Ubuntu for a few years. This time I got tired of the completely crappy/inconsistent interfaces, and having to spend way too much of my time being a sysadmin.

Now I've got a Mac. It's nicely designed, I don't have to mess with it, and I've got a Unix-variant at my fingertips when I'm feeling that command-line itch. I still have to deal with lack of software due to Windows dominance, but I'm learning to live without some stuff.

All of this is on my home machine. At work where I need the real thing it's vterms to a Unix box, baby.

Having said that, I did this because it was MY CHOICE. I didn't hand control over to anyone. I can install just about any software I care to on this machine and Steve Jobs is not going to show up with a baseball bat. OSS paranoia about the big bad corporations coming to steal your compilers doesn't help anything.

Re:why are its users so stupid?

[Concerned Onlooker]

So, you're saying they should have bought a Windows machine? Your exclusion of mentioning Windows implies that. By the way, a default Mac comes with more FOSS software installed than a Windows box ever will. But good troll anyway.

Re:Easier to read article

[TheRaven64]

Or, even easier, you could see that the domain name is pcpro.co.uk, and skip right to the comments without reading the troll, sorry, article.

Re:The Gov't

[girlintraining]

It's a pain now. But if power is abused enough, we'll find DNS servers popping up that are alternatives for censorship-enabled countries like the United States and China.

Hopefully Nobody.

[wideBlueSkies]

See post title, thanks.

Re:why are its users so stupid?

[Mr. Slippery]

I didn't hand control over to anyone. I can install just about any software I care to on this machine and Steve Jobs is not going to show up with a baseball bat.

It is likely that this will no longer be the case if you continue with the Apple platform. They have already begun to move the Mac toward the same walled-garden, censored model as the iPad. No, jerkwad Jobs won't come over with a baseball bat, he'll just make it difficult-to-impossible for you to install any non-Apple-approved software on your box in the first place.

The Web is awful anyway...

[Bobakitoo]

It full of spam, viruss and random corporate junk. Gopher could be revived or a new protocol implemented, ditching the World Wide Web for something better. And leaving all the twiters and farcebook back on the old www.

They can control all they want, build walled garden.. But for as long as the Internet remain neutral, we can build a better Web.

Re:The Gov't

[Sepodati]

Really? How does the progression from "sites dealing in counterfeit goods" to "sites with dissenting opinion" happen? What court is going to issue that order unless the accusers are lying?

Re:why are its users so stupid?

[Mr. Slippery]

They're not going to force you to use the app store. That's retarded and you're retarded for thinking it.

They've already forced that on two platforms. It's "retarded" to not consider the possibility of them applying the same strategy to their remaining platform. I mean, how is Jobs going to bring you "freedom from porn" if you can install whatever unapproved software you like?

I think Dan Gilmore's got it right:

I fear that Apple will use the inroads it makes with the Mac App Store to further restrict what users of future Macs can do. It couldn't retroactively lock down Macs the way it's locked down the iOS devices, not without creating a firestorm. But it could someday decide to sell only iOS machines, or declare that new machines running some future Mac OS -- not next summer's Mac OSX "Lion" version, apparently -- would work only under the same principles. I believe this is the endgame, but I'm hoping for the best.

(Oh, and Apple-fanboi mods: I'm not trolling. Disagreement != trolling.)