I am worried about the Internet. Are you?
“And I realized there are dot-com people and there are web people. Dot-com people work for start-ups injected with large Silicon Valley coin, they have options, they talk options, they dream options. They have IPOs. They’re richer after four months of “web” work than many web people who’ve been doing it since the beginning. They don’t have personal sites. They don’t want personal sites. They don’t get personal sites. They don’t get personal. Web people can tell you the first site they ever saw, they can tell you the moment they knew: This, This Is It, I Will Do This. And they pour themselves into the web, with stories, with designs, with pictures. They create things worth looking at, worth reading, worth coveting, worth envying, worth loving.”
.. So wrote Meg Hurihan, a random person with an amazing blog
Then Dries Buthaert went on:
The web felt very different fifteen years ago, when I founded Drupal. Just 7 percent of the population had internet access, there were only around 20 million websites, and Google was a small, private company. Facebook, Twitter, and other household tech names were years away from being founded. In these early days, the web felt like a free space that belonged to everyone. No one company dominated as an access point or controlled what users saw. This is what I call the “open web
But the internet has changed drastically over the last decade. It’s become a more closed web. Rather than a decentralized and open landscape, many people today primarily interact with a handful of large platform companies online, such as Google or Facebook. To many users, Facebook and Google aren’t part of the internet — they are the internet.
And then Ev Williams went on, the guy behind Twitter and Medium
There were always ecommerce startups,” he says. “I was never part of that world, and we kind of looked down on them when the whole boom was happening. We were creating businesses, but ours had more creativity, ours weren’t just for the money. Or maybe ours were even for utility but not just money, whereas clearly there are ways for both.”
The dangers of corporate consolidation dominate his metaphors. A favorite idea is that the web’s current state resembles the factory-farmed food system. “If your job was to feed people, but you were only measured by the efficiency of calories delivered, you may learn over time that high-calorie, high-processed foods were the most efficient ways to deliver calories,” he says. They would be the most margin-friendly way to deliver calories. But the food still wouldn’t be good — because the original metric didn’t take into account “sustainability, or health, or nourishment, or happiness of the people.”
The three of them — Ev Williams from Medium, Dries Buytaert from Drupal and Mag the random girl with an amazing blog talk about something similar, something that disappoints them, something that should concern all of us at least those who loved the open web at any point in time.
Is Internet getting closed like it happened with every large innovation over history? Is Facebook really becoming the Internet now that it has sent its giant Internet drone in the skies just months after it tried to be the Internet for the people of India?
Social networks are operated by algorithms, whose machinations are proprietary knowledge, they worry that people are losing any control over what they see when they log on.
For professor Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University this is already a dejavu:
Every major telecommunications technology has followed the same array: a brief, thrilling period of openness, followed by a monopolistic and increasingly atrophied closedness. Railroad, electricity, cable, telephone — all followed this similar pattern toward closedness and monopoly, and government regulated or not, it tends to happen because of the power of network effects and the economies of scale.
These are amazing people, amazing thinkers who have done amazing things for all of us much before I saw the first cat video and all the other things the open web made possible for me, for my education and for my future. And they spoke in the same voice. Do you think we should rather ignore them?
Let’s not forget that the open Internet was approved even by Jesus himself:
