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Post "Good Google," Who Will Defend the Open Web?
psykocrime writes "The crazy kids at Fogbeam Labs have started a discussion about Google and their relationship with the Open Web, and questioning who will step up to defend these principles, even as Google seem to be abdicating their position as such a champion. Some candidates mentioned include Yahoo, IBM, Red Hat, Mozilla, Microsoft and The Wikimedia Foundation, among others. The question is, what organization(s) have both the necessary clout and the required ethical principles, to truly champion the Open Web, in the face of commercial efforts which are clearly inimical to Open Source, Open Standards, Libre Culture and other elements of an Open Web?"
DoD, and universities. Use Internet standards or we'll kick your...well, you won't get that contract renewal. It worked pretty well in the old days.
The EFF has been pretty consistent over the years. Perhaps they lack the clout, but they certainly have remained pretty steadfast for a long time now.
Your political party doesn't care about your rights and only represents corporate interests.
Companies always act in their own interests, it's just that some are more ethical than others.
Why do we need a Champion, when we could have a Hall of Heroes?
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Some candidates mentioned include Yahoo, IBM, Red Hat, Mozilla, Microsoft and The Wikimedia Foundation, among others
It was clearly over four minutes before you posted. Pretty much everyone here would scoff at MS.
What's left is pointless discussions of opinion about "Oh, I think THIS large multinational corporation which is utterly devoid of any conscience, as they all are, is lately acting better than this OTHER one, so we should root for them instead."
We may as well skip right to godwining. (Insert the name of the company you think is evil) is basically (insert inappropriate historical bad guy here).
I'm don't exactly disagree, Google is a corporation, and corporations will defend and support structures and principles like the Open Web as long as they percieve strategic benefit and fianacial gain, so clearly other organisations need to defend these structures and principles. But other for-profit companies like Yahoo, IBM, Microsoft? Seriously? Companies will defend and protect their interests only, our interests are users can only align with theirs, not be permenantly linked.
In fact, I still believe that Google 'gets' the web in ways that other companies, like some of those that are listed as alternatives, don't. This doesn't mean that they are 'good' but that they at least have a decent long-term interest in seeing some of the principles crucial to us as users be upheld. I've gone in deeper in this in an article on 'Our uneasy relationship with Google' (resolutely ad-free and non-commercial, please don't kill this comment as spam).
But long-term and from an ideological viewpoint, the only organisations that you should have faith in for the big issues that will affect us and shape the future of the web, it'd have to an entity with no financial stake and no legal obligation to shareholders. There is simply no way around the fact that any corporation will retain and protect principles only as long it percieves them to be benefical to itself as a business.
Those who say Wikimedia is powerless, I completely disagree. They're a non-profit concerned with sharing the largest quantity of the most accurate knowledge with the most people. They control several of the most popular websites on earth with few commercial interests and have representatives in MANY languages.
Their largest subset (or was it them too? wp and wm?) also showed their willingness to shutdown completely for a day to demonstrate principles. Google would have taken quite a hit monetarily if they completely shut down (they just posted links and warnings).
The entire list is irrelevant and has no influence.
Aside from that the real question is, does the Internet need to be open?
I believe most people are falsely lulled into accepting that the moment you put open in front of something it must, by rights, be better then the alternative. Open Web is obviously better then the un-Open Web (really, what do you call the alternative), but who exactly is crippled by the current state of the Internet? Is there someone or some organization out there fundamentally unable to use the Internet because its not "open".
It can't be about expense because its is ridiculously inexpensive to host a website these days. Yes maybe running something like Wikipedia is arguably expensive, but then again, if Wikipedia had any influence on web standards and innovation they would have invented a cheaper way to run a massive web services.
It also can't be about access because while I agree there is a huge layer of telecom interfering with web access, fundamentally it is easy and relatively inexpensive to find and access web services. You may not always have blistering fast speeds or unlimited downloads, but there are internet service providers offering internet for as little as a few dollars a month making it virtually affordable by anybody that cares to go online.
So I don't exactly know how the current un-Open Web is interfering with people's ability to access, communicate, socialize, and even, shudder, profit from the Internet?
The fact is that the Internet as we know it is slowly dying, instead morphing into a services platform to back native applications. Argue all you like about native apps vs web app, but a considerable amount of internet traffic these days is through an app running on a device. Netflix accounts for a huge portion of internet traffic and a significant portion of that is through a device, NOT a browser. Our TVs, phones, tablets, refrigerators, thermostats, even light bulbs will account for more internet traffic in the near future then people hopping onto a web page through a web browser on a "computer". And again, has the un-Open Web interfered with our ability to webify devices? I can buy Raspberry Pi or Arduino and have a device online in minutes, open devices using un-Open Web.
I think it comes down to nothing more then senseless idealism that something so fundamentally ubiquitous as the Internet should also be fundamentally "open". But sometimes advocates of a cause can't see past the cause, and thus don't realize how pointless it is. Put on your orange bracelet and lets all support the Scause!
Maybe Google stopped championing open web because they have come to the conclusion that it is a completely irrelevant concept.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I don't think this is really that much different. Mostly in that Google was never particularly open. They just happen to have finally killed a service that people actually care about (vs like Wave or Buzz or even iGoogle) in their Ahab-like (or Quixotic, depending on your view) pursuit of G+.
They never cared about RSS and it's obvious Reader was never anything but a back-shelf product people happened to like, because, well, Google. None of their (major) products have been developed "in the open"; the fact you can even get the source to Android is quite something. Where's the open development (or source code) for Web Search, Gmail, G+, calendar, etc? Locked up tight. Don't idealize Google; they were never an "open source" company.
Screw the web. If you want to beat Google, don't do it on their playground. It's not even a very good one.
Then it's very disingenuous of you to post the article as if you were a third party when you are not.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
> Mozilla has just caved in to H.264
We don't always win our battles, unfortunately. Holding out against H.264 was doing no-one any good.
> they removed the feed button from their browser long before Google killed that feed reader
Come on, lack of a "feed button" != evil.
> and their new mobile OS comes with a paid "app store".
Supporting paid apps != evil.
Apps only available through a single app store controlled by the system vendor with obnoxious policies == evil. But FirefoxOS isn't like that at all.