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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.'"
The Sydney Morning Herald article may have been sparked by Anil Dash's recent Blog Post - The Web We Lost ... which was discussed on /. last week.
... HO-HO-HO! ;-)
Anil also wrote a followup titled "Rebuilding the Web We Lost" that may be worth reading.
Speaking of the "lost web", we no longer see as many offbeat websites like this one
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
I miss you Geocities!
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.
Computer hobbyists in the '80s complained that IBM and Microsoft had taken over "their" world. Car enthusiasts in the '20s probably complained about Ford and GM. When an industry becomes mature there are relatively few market leaders, practically by definition, and those leaders generally don't innovate more than they have to. Why? Network effects is one reason. Economies of scale is another. There's the good ol' monopolistic practices of the robber barons. And a couple gentlemen on Mad. Avenue explained another reason: our brains only have room for two or three entrants for most market categories that we don't happen to be fanatical or professionally involved with.
As Scott McNealy would have said, "Get over it."
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.
Maybe they should change the site to
slashandparrydot
ye Olde Slashdoth
Walled Home and Garden
Internostalgia
Get Thee Oft My Lawn
Its been almost 12 hours since the latest Windows 8 sucks submission.
Captcha: Terrors
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
For all the whining, the Internet is really more open these days than ever. If nothing else, there's a lot more world-wide participation. For a good part of the Internet's history, it was nearly all in the US with only token amounts outside. Now it really is a world-wide network.
Also some of the companies mentioned really aren't doing much in the way of any sort of lock-in. Yes Amazon has about 1% of the Internet in its data centers, which is pretty impressive, but it is just hosting. You buy the virtual servers to do as you please (within the ToS of course). You can even compete with Amazon using Amazon. Netflix hosts a lot of their videos on Amazon EC2.
The Internet may not be the anarchist-geek dreamworld, but it is more open than anything else I can think of in human history, and more open than it was in the past.
Speaking of the "lost web", we no longer see as many offbeat websites like this one ... HO-HO-HO! ;-)
My eyes...ze goggles, zey do nothing!!!!
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
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.
Yeah, there totally isn't any way to do anything on the internet without Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.
Except for:
- Discussion forums, which exist for pretty much every single interest group imaginable
- Places to post images
- A whole spectrum of places to buy stuff, most of which AREN'T Amazon
- Millions of blogs about every conceivable topic and viewpoint
- Websites by companies providing information about what they sell
- A way to interact with the government
- Online banking
- Research
- A whole lot of stuff neither I, nor anybody else, has even thought up yet
And you can do all of those things without touching a single service or product sold by one of the big giants.
In conclusion... what on earth is he talking about?
... 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.