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?

[beakerMeep]

Actually, Slashdot posted it yesterday: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/11/26/1450257/US-Government-Seizes-Torrent-Search-Engine-Domain
 
The same day as your link.

Slashdot may have political bias, but when it comes to tech, no party or ideology gets off the hook.

I'd sooner suspect your bias, for linking to TheHill, than Slashdot's.

Re:How do we make sure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. You mean expressing my anger online hasn't permanently fixed the problem? This is an outrage!

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?

[blahplusplus]

"Slashdot may have political bias"

Speaking about political bias, peoples understanding of what reason is and how it functions is seriously incorrect on all sides.

Everyone on slashdot should see the following:

Clip from important part:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

Te whole thing on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOdJMuCreDA

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?

[girlintraining]

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

If you remember your history, originally they did. None of this non-sense was happening until private businesses moved in and demanded government protection for their profit margins.

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

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:Answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately javascript, Flash, Silverlight, etc... can easily be leveraged to compromise your anonymity via Tor.

Oh noes! Someone might find out that my real IP address is 192.168.1.100!

Re:Answer

[girlintraining]

You know, people are always reluctant for me to touch their computers and install privacy-enhancing software, until I show them how much faster their computer runs without malware, spyware, and pre-installed garbage. After I strip away all the advertisements they see on the web, they're utterly delighted. They want to buy me dinner, or hug me until I choke. They go from skeptics to supporters in a matter of minutes. And then I explain to them how I did it, and ask them to show their friends.

People come to me all the time now asking for the same services: How do I turn off advertisements on my internet? How to I get rid of all these popups trying to sell me crap? And increasingly, people are asking me how they can browse without the government knowing what they are looking at. See, people do read all this crap on CNN; They just feel powerless to do anything about it.

But once they have a community resource willing to show them, suddenly you've got the most unlikeliest of people knocking at your door. Traditional arguments about power and government hold little weight when I can show people how to push a button and make all the bullsh*t go away. No more tracking. No more advertisements. Bamf. Gone. All of it. They're free to use the public resource that is the internet with a peace of mind and just a smidgeon of anonymity and privacy.

And they do. Oh how they do.

Re:The Gov't

[Dthief]

Sorry for the shitty formatting, here is a more legible format Unfortunately the US government (at least in the US) has pulled ahead in terms of controlling the internet via seizure:

July: http://www.gamepolitics.com/2010/07/01/ice-seizes-website-domains-part-copyright-crackdown

Nov: http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/130763-homeland-security-dept-seizes-domain-names-

Dec: ?

And in the UK its the police:

Mid-November: http://libcom.org/news/police-force-shut-down-fitwatchorguk-16112010

Late-November: http://www.techeye.net/internet/uk-police-want-power-to-shut-down-websites

Power

[hb79]

With great power comes great responsibility. Most of these big companies are missing at least one of those.

Me

[RAMMS EIN]

Who will win control of the Web? I will. In fact, I already have it, and have had it since some time in the 1990s. And if some entity somehow takes that control away from me, I or one of my many fellow producers of web content will create a new Web, and we will use that.

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.

Easier to read article

[cheebie]

Or you could go read the 'print' version which is all on one page and not 75% advertisement.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/363175/who-will-win-the-battle-for-control-of-the-web/print

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.

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:None of the above

[mmcxii]

You're not using your soul anyway. You'd never even miss it.

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: The question is biased

[openfrog]

You and I, silly people. Why are we deluding ourselves into believing only massive multinational companies can control the web,

You are right that the Web belongs to you and I. And it goes further. TFA asks the question backwards:

Control of this new evolution 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.

This question is biased. The Web has not been created by corporate entities and is not "up for grabs". The web has evolved out of the cumulative connectedness of public networks through public standards, which development is still overseen by the WWW Consortium. Attempts to privatize parts of it (eg. AOL) have failed and new attempts must fail if we wish to see the Web further innovate.

Read Tim Berners-Lee latest article. It articulates the questions facing the evolution of the Web so much more clearly:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web

Re:The Gov't

[zach_the_lizard]

You think those amendments really count anymore? I got stopped by a drunk driving checkpoint without any probable cause beyond "he was in a vehicle." Eminent domain lets them take whatever they want, especially in light of the latest ruling on it, for any purpose. Just compensation is whatever the government says it is.

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: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.)