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How the Internet Became a Closed Shop
AcidAUS sends this quote from the Sydney Morning Herald:
"A little over a decade ago, just before the masses discovered the digital universe, the internet was a borderless new frontier: a terra nullius to be populated by individuals, groups and programmers as they saw fit. There were few rules and no boundaries. Freedom and open standards, sharing information for the greater good was the ethos. Today, the open internet we once knew is fracturing into a series of gated communities or fiefdoms controlled by giants like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and to a lesser extent Microsoft. A billion-dollar battle conducted in walled cities where companies try to lock our consumption into their vision of the internet. It has left some lamenting the 'web we lost.'"
Freedom and open standards, sharing information for the greater good was the ethos.
No it wasn't. This is someone inventing a nostalgic version of the Internet that didn't exist. Prior to Facebook, etc. there was AOL and Compuserve which had their own "walled gardens" and gated versions of the Internet. Throughout the 90s it was a fight of both Netscape and Microsoft pushing proprietary HTML elements and the "Best viewed in Netscape" or "Best viewed in IE" nonsense.
Times change. You can never go home. Things were always better in the past. I can remember when all of this was farmland. Now get off my lawn.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
I lived through the open web, even before that, in the days of dial-up BBS services. And you know what? It sucked compared to the web we have today. Aside from speed issues, which our irrelevant in this conversation, the quality, variety, and value of available content was crap compared today. These walled gardens have motivated and allowed all sorts of great content, inventions, and application.
Furthermore, the open web hasn't gone away. Its still there and there are several other 'communities' that are essentially open webs unto themselves. We just don't think about them or use them much (for some) because there are better things to do online (e.g. cat photos and stumbleupon).
Drop the nostalgic nonsense.
Ok, can we just stop paying attention to traditional media until it all dies? I don't think I've read an article in the last year that wasn't trying to provoke outrage, fear or hatred through selective reporting, manipulation of data, and gross simplification.
Today, the open internet we once knew is fracturing into a series of gated communities or fiefdoms controlled by giants like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and to a lesser extent Microsoft.
What, so now it's impossible to start your own website? To run your own services? That's news to me. Just because there are now large, popular sites doesn't mean small, unpopular sites are now non-existent. The internet that we had 30 years ago is still there, it's just nobody uses it. But it's not like, say, the presence of Facebook means IIRC has suddenly been uninvented.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
The "web we lost" is all still there, more or less, in that nothing about the underlying technology of the web has changed. But no-one is interested in the old ways of doing things, and 'modern' services like Facebook are what people obviously want. In other words, like government, we get the web we deserve.
It's the same argument as the FSF's indictment of software as a service. And frankly, they're right.
Software delivered "as a service" is much, much more closed than even closed source software. Closed source software can be pirated, reverse engineered, decompiled, run on machines sufficiently isolated that they can't call home, ... you have none of those options with software as a service. You cannot prevent those companies spying on you by any means at all.
So yes, the facebook/dropbox/office 360/google world is worse than the closed-source microsoft monopoly.
... of the internet were wonderful if you were a ham radio operator, scientist, programmer, network engineer, fan of roguelike RPGs or Star Trek.
Other than that there wasn't a huge amount of content out there.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
You may laugh about the crappy eye-hurting design, but when we lost geocities and similar amateur websites we lost a lot of information that isn't on the web anywhere else.
Manufactures and tech websites can give you the specs on things, but Joe Blow in his garage pulling apart a blender and posting the pics would (accidently sometimes) show how to open it without breaking the internal clips.
There was a lot of information on damn near anything if you knew how to search for it. Now everything is a bland advertisement or a repost of the same list of data over and over. SEO just about finished it off.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...