November 16, 2009
The Web in Danger
I love the Internet. I love lots of things that are on the Internet. I have less love for things that want to undermine the Internet.
Tim O'Reilly, The War for the Web:
If you've followed my thinking about Web 2.0 from the beginning, you know that I believe we are engaged in a long term project to build an internet operating system. In my talks over the years, I've argued that there are two models of operating system, which I have characterized as "One Ring to Rule Them All" and "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," with the latter represented by a routing map of the Internet.
The first is the winner-takes-all world that we saw with Microsoft Windows on the PC, a world that promises simplicity and ease of use, but ends up diminishing user and developer choice as the operating system provider.
The second is an operating system that works like the Internet itself, like the web, and like open source operating systems like Linux: a world that is admittedly less polished, less controlled, but one that is profoundly generative of new innovations because anyone can bring new ideas to the market without having to ask permission of anyone.
I've outlined a few of the ways that big players like Facebook, Apple, and News Corp are potentially breaking the "small pieces loosely joined" model of the Internet. But perhaps most threatening of all are the natural monopolies created by Web 2.0 network effects.
One of the points I've made repeatedly about Web 2.0 is that it is the design of systems that get better the more people use them, and that over time, such systems have a natural tendency towards monopoly.
And so we've grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we've been readying ourselves for one dominant social network.
Doc Searls, Beyond Social Media:
Missing in action is credit to what goes below private platforms like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook — namely the Net, the Web, and the growing portfolio of standards that comprise the deep infrastructure, the geology, that makes social media (and everything else they support) possible.
Look at four other social things you can do on the Net (along with the standards and protocols that support them): email (SMTP, POP3, IMAP, MIME); blogging (HTTP, XML, RSS, Atom); podcasting (RSS); and instant messaging (IRC, XMPP, SIP/SIMPLE). Unlike private social media platforms, these are NEA: Nobody owns them, Everybody can use them and Anybody can improve them. That’s what makes them infrastructural and generative. (Even in cases where protocols were owned, such as by Dave Winer with RSS, efforts were made to remove ownership as an issue.)
Tweeting today is in many ways like instant messaging was when the only way you could do it was with AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and ICQ. All were silos, with little if any interoperabiity. Some still are.
Chris Messina, The Death of the URL:
The rise of the “app store mentality” is a direct attack on the web, and on the very nature of free discovery and choice built upon URL-based hyperlinks. By depriving us the ability to pick and choose which “stores” we shop from on these devices — we’re empowering a new breed of middle men and ceding to them monopoly control over our digital experience. The architecture of the web was intended to withstand such threats — but that all changes when the hardware makers get into the content business! Even though developers are beginning to see the dark side of this faustian bargain, the momentum is huge — and big business smells money.
By removing our ability to navigate, choose, and share freely — these app stores are exchanging our freedom for a promise that they’ll keep us safe, give us everything we need, and do all the choosing of what’s “good enough” for us — all starting at ninety-nine cents a hit.
We cannot say we were not warned. We will not be able to say "nobody saw this coming". It's clear that, even those who are privileged by access and wealth and the ability to amplify their own voices have anticipated that we'll all be disenfranchised by the private companies that own and control our networks of communication. And yet, most of our effort and ambition in the technology industry are not going towards building for the open web. Most communities that are disadvantaged are still trying to win on networks that they don't own and will never control. Most of us are still cheering when the most powerful voices in culture and society embrace closed networks, instead of properly criticizing them for doing so.
I am still optimistic; Apple's control over smartphone usage with the iPhone today is but a sliver compared to AOL's enormous control over Internet access a decade ago, and AOL still eventually crumbled in the face of open standards. But the web's victory over the proprietary networks that have been built on top of it is not inevitable — it's going to take lots of hard work. And right now, it's not just the attention that's disproportionately lavished on proprietary platforms that want to undermine the open web, it's the money too. We'll have to turn those strengths into weaknesses if we're going to undo the trend towards disempowerment and centralization that's going on right now.
This, for me, is a social issue, a cultural issue, and a political issue, not just a technological issue. Perhaps we need to speak of it that way more often, to make the stakes clear.
The narrative here is interesting - decentralization is good because its more democratic, provides more choice to "the people". But behind all the high-flown moralizing rhetoric about freedom on the internet, who really ends up as the beneficiary of all this supposed openness?
We're told that Wikipedia is more open than Britannica, but are they? The presence of an edit button on the page is the propaganda that conceals the truth: most edits made by people outside of a small circle of technological (often white & male) elites who have de facto control, are reverted.
We're told that open source projects are democratic, but in reality, the rule for participation is "scratch your own itch", which is an enormous barrier that excludes everyone except this same group of elites. Despite the rhetoric of openness, proprietary software companies are far more open to users' than so-called "open" source, which explains why Linux has succeeded as a server OS but utterly failed on the desktop. The open source movement is primarily interested in serving themselves, which is fine - but when they assert that the entire internet should be organized to their benefit, something is wrong. When a techno-oligarchy is created in the name of freedom and democracy, we should be extremely concerned.
I'm certainly no fan of corporations, and I'm well-aware of the potential for abuse with vendor lock-in. But is the openness movement really offering an alternative? Or have they simply co-opted the language of decentralization to transfer power from business elites to themselves, another group of elites that styles itself as "the people"?
We should remember what Lenin said: "Freedom, yes - but for whom, and to do what?"
this blog remind me of another article, the Rising of Stupid Network by David Isenberg a decade ago. David prophecy the centralise controlled network would be repalced bu dump internet with intelligent endpoint.
The trend comes to web and web apps now
While the technically advanced will miss the 'openness', what about the 95% of internet users who appreciate the aggregation? Who appreciate the defacto editor that helps to staunch the flow of links and content? It seems to me that for every person frustrated by the lack of options to the app store, there are hundreds of people who'd have been infected or identity thieved by a more Windows XP style solution.
(For the record, I liked the ecosystem of XP, but how many times do you rebuild your step-father's computer because of porn viruses before you recommend a Mac?)
App Stores and Walled Gardens versus "Openness" strike me as the same Convention vs. Configuration argument we've been having for a millennium.
Who owns the infrastructure? Truckers may be unionized, but the highways are free for me to ship things on my own, with my own truck. I don't see this as an either/or scenario any more than I saw print as an us vs. them proposal while making (printed) short-run zines in college. The two can co-exist, and each feeds off the other in the end.
I have to agree with digdoug that the vast majority of users may not really care, and may appreciate having things simplified for them. Yes, that sounds horrific so a subset of us power users (or simply chaotic neutral digital hippies ;), but mechanics don't weep for the cars coming in to their garages bereft of oil -- they fix them and move on. Some people *want* others to filter their info. At a certain level, don't you have to trust others? Unless everyone listed above grows, harvests and cooks all their own sustenance...
I think it's important that we continue to fight for what we believe, and offer better, but more transparent and decentralized services to compete with these "big box" webheads. What's being hinted at here speaks more to human nature than anything else. As Mr. Teacup points out, even "open" projects succumb to the whimsy of human nature. Decentralized? Rare is the human group where this plays out evenly.
So it is on the Internet, I guess.
If the worry is that people will all flock to the big box store when it comes to web services I don't see why people should be concerned. What company has had dominance over the free market so much so that they've never failed? Given a long enough time line, competition comes in and breaks things up. If some are arguing that open source is merely replacing one power structure for another I couldn't disagree more: It's morphing the power structure and the philosophy surrounding it. You can see these changes today just through competition (closed and open source) because of a shift in philosophy. Apple had the market cornered on mp3's...oh wait, no they didn't, they had the market cornered on M4Ps. Then Amazon came around with a simple change to the same model, open MP3 formats for the same price. Suddenly apple's taken a complete reverse on their previous position.
People jailbreak their phones / touches to give them apps... suddenly an app market place emerges.
Google makes android, people develop code for android, Verizon backs down on their previous stance that they can regulate how you pay for data. Vcast, MMS, SMS, GPS can all be "subverted" by open standards. If you've used one, think of how your contacts on any other phone for the longest time were locked into your phone. You had to pay someone at a phone store to export them and import them into another system.
Drupal and wordpress and joomla start sucking up so much market share that proprietary CMS are dinosaurs. What's the big shift? While the projects may still be run by a very elite (talent wise, not rich whites as suggested above, webchick is hardly male and one of the most influential drupal peeps) programmers and project managers, the data in those systems often is set free. You can find pretty easy ways of importing, exporting, feeding, aggregating, WHATEVER-ing your content from one to the other.
Do companies like google, apple, microsoft and others help all of us move forward? Of course they do. They give us reason to react to, alter, create viruses for (which are coming to apple as it gets popular and hated too, sry fanboys) and generally try to improve upon the huge corporations efforts (also hinted about in a negative way). Those companies also react to the person in their basement creating the next big web social project. You mean to tell me microsoft doesn't react to Firefox development / feature set?
Great article, love all the sources you've brought together as I've never seen them before. I've also been bitching about the App store and this pretty much puts that into words that describe it better. Check out this article too for more anti-app store goodness http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/11/joe-hewitt-developer-of-facebooks-massively-popular-iphone-app-quits-the-project/
If the worry is that people will all flock to the big box store when it comes to web services I don't see why people should be concerned. What company has had dominance over the free market so much so that they've never failed? Given a long enough time line, competition comes in and breaks things up. If some are arguing that open source is merely replacing one power structure for another I couldn't disagree more: It's morphing the power structure and the philosophy surrounding it. You can see these changes today just through competition (closed and open source) because of a shift in philosophy. Apple had the market cornered on mp3's...oh wait, no they didn't, they had the market cornered on M4Ps. Then Amazon came around with a simple change to the same model, open MP3 formats for the same price. Suddenly apple's taken a complete reverse on their previous position.
People jailbreak their phones / touches to give them apps... suddenly an app market place emerges.
Google makes android, people develop code for android, Verizon backs down on their previous stance that they can regulate how you pay for data. Vcast, MMS, SMS, GPS can all be "subverted" by open standards. If you've used one, think of how your contacts on any other phone for the longest time were locked into your phone. You had to pay someone at a phone store to export them and import them into another system.
Drupal and wordpress and joomla start sucking up so much market share that proprietary CMS are dinosaurs. What's the big shift? While the projects may still be run by a very elite (talent wise, not rich whites as suggested above, webchick is hardly male and one of the most influential drupal peeps) programmers and project managers, the data in those systems often is set free. You can find pretty easy ways of importing, exporting, feeding, aggregating, WHATEVER-ing your content from one to the other.
Do companies like google, apple, microsoft and others help all of us move forward? Of course they do. They give us reason to react to, alter, create viruses for (which are coming to apple as it gets popular and hated too, sry fanboys) and generally try to improve upon the huge corporations efforts (also hinted about in a negative way). Those companies also react to the person in their basement creating the next big web social project. You mean to tell me microsoft doesn't react to Firefox development / feature set?
Great article, love all the sources you've brought together as I've never seen them before. I've also been bitching about the App store and this pretty much puts that into words that describe it better. Check out this article too for more anti-app store goodness http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/11/joe-hewitt-developer-of-facebooks-massively-popular-iphone-app-quits-the-project/
I think there is a danger in sounding the klaxxons about this in too broad of terms. Silo-ing has always been a part of the web ecosystem and interoperability between overlapping systems is rarely frictionless. Tim's comment about "natural monopolies" is on the mark.
Walled gardens are bad, bottlenecks for application development are bad, URL obfuscation is bad... but lumping them all into the same boat suggests there is one overarching comprehensive solution. Clearly there isn't. I'll happily get behind the banner of Web Neutrality or whatever articulated ethic this shapes into, but I don't think the nitty gritty details will easily lend themselves to it.
I think there is a danger in sounding the klaxxons about this in too broad of terms. Silo-ing has always been a part of the web ecosystem and interoperability between overlapping systems is rarely frictionless. Tim's comment about "natural monopolies" is on the mark.
Walled gardens are bad, bottlenecks for application development are bad, URL obfuscation is bad... but lumping them all into the same boat suggests there is one overarching comprehensive solution. Clearly there isn't. I'll happily get behind the banner of Web Neutrality or whatever articulated ethic this shapes into, but I don't think the nitty gritty details will easily lend themselves to it.
Just came across this blog post by Robert Scoble, about how you can tell a good startup from a bad startup:
"If I look around and don’t see programmers. I can smell programmers. A good company is full of them. Posterous, for instance, has ONLY programmers. FriendFeed had something like 13 programmers and one other person. Great ratio."
Isn't this a clear desire for a company controlled by an oligarchy of programmers?
The web needs some degree of centralization. The argument seems to suggest Alltop and Technorati are bad because they centralize the web. If there aren't hubs somewhere, we're all talking to ourselves.
Mega-hubs may be an issue (ie Uber Centralization)--but their value and risk/reward proposition is all industry and issue specific.
If Uber centralization happens the market generally corrects. Its only when uber centralization is mixed with barriers (in the case of the Wall Street Journal) that this seems to be an issue.
Chris Messinas criticism seems to be apps need hyperlinks.
The web has also helped many small business stay afloat. Yes, the web has led to many monopolies of certain niches. But that should not be overshadowed by the fact that the internet has leveled the playing field in a lot of ways to. The fact that a kid with a computer and lots of time on his hands can create a website, do lots of seo, and get their site ranked above a multibillion dollar company with a multimillion dollar internet marketing budget shows you how anyone can get rich using the web if they have time and know what they are doing.
CLEAR Internet Atlanta