The future of the Web may not be free
It’s not just about net neutrality or privacy anymore. Our future internet could be the very opposite of what it is today—free—specifically due to companies dominating their markets and the constant push to simplify the user experience.
Tim O’Reilly predicts a war is coming, one where we are at the mercy of the internet giants like Google, Facebook, and Apple: they stop making the services we are so highly dependent on interoperable.
It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we’ll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we’ve enjoyed for the past two decades. But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.
Chris Messina fears something similar as well: the death of the URL, as new formats for delivering web content are abstracting the website-going experience and letting ourselves relinquish control.
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.
I know that if we always look at things with a worst case scenario in mind, we’ll never get any work done from here on out. But better to worry now than when it becomes impossible to undo things. I like how the Web is now, no matter how chaotic and crap-filled it can be.
That said, if the URL disappears, I know few people would be troubled by it, and an overhaul of the system may be needed anyway.
And as for the giants bullying us into a corner, it makes me wish the Long Tail would stand a chance.
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I seldom use a search engine to navigate to a site I am familiar with. I rely – a lot – on SeaMonkey/FireFox to complete the domain/URL I type.
And I keep getting surprised by customers and friends that have never, ever knowingly used a URL – they search on “http://www.google.com/” to take two steps to get to the site. Whether they use Bing, or Yahoo, or any other search engine.
Recently I put up a new site, without a domain name, for the customer to review progress. I emailed the URL – and got a complaint, that the URL “didn’t work”. It traced down to – Microsft search didn’t find the URL, when the customer used his usual navigation process. As far as I could tell, until that day the customer had never knowingly used the address bar for entering a domain or URL.
I am sure that the music and movie industries would be delighted to enforce paid navigation on everyone, as well as the advertisers and merchants wanting captive audiences. It would be like telling a newcomer to town, “Nope. This is the only road in town; it goes to Wal-Mart over there, and back that way is Conoco. It don’t go nowhere else.”
It seems that a sizeable portion of the Internet public won’t understand the concern you raise, perhaps even after the ability to use “raw” URL’s is denigrated or disabled.
By Brad K. on November 18, 2009 10:27 pm
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