José Ribamar Smolka Ramos
Telecomunicações
Artigos e Mensagens
WirelessBrasil
Janeiro 2014 Índice Geral
13/01/14
• Recomendações de leitura na "Wired"
Assunto pra muita discussão...
Cada vez mais as pessoas saem do modelo padrão de acesso a aplicações na
Internet via web browsers, partindo para soluções semi-fechadas baseadas em apps
em smartphones e tablets - e, breve, nas estações multimidia dos seus carros,
nas interfaces dos seus home gateways, possivelmente embutidos nas suas smart
TVs.
O que isto representa para o que conhecemos como a Internet até agora? Alguns
artigos para reflexão.
Leia na Fonte: Wired
[13/01/14]
The PC’s Death Might Also Mean the Web’s Demise - by Marcus Wohlsen
Leia na Fonte: Wired
[17/08/10]
The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet - by Chris Anderson and Michael
Wolff
Aproveitem.
[ ]'s
J. R. Smolka
-----------------------------------------
Leia na Fonte: Wired
[13/01/14]
The PC’s Death Might Also Mean the Web’s Demise - by Marcus Wohlsen
[Obs: Ler na fonte para acessar os hiperlinks do texto]
The long, torturous death throes of the PC grew more excruciating than ever last
year. Several research firms say PC shipments plunged a record 10 percent last
year, the steepest drop ever. But, as smartphones and tablets take over our
world, it’s not just laptops and desktops that could wind up on the pile of dead
tech. They may drag the web down with them.
Keith Rabois thinks so, and he’s not alone. PayPal mafioso Rabois has a good
tech track record. After his early involvement in PayPal, he helped bootstrap
LinkedIn. He backed social photo startup Slide, which Google bought for nine
figures. And he was chief operating officer at Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s
mobile payments company Square. Now, he works as an investor at Khosla Ventures,
and he believes the end of the PC also means the web is over:
Keith Rabois @rabois
@semil nobody is going to be using the web soon.
Keith Rabois @rabois
@Stammy the web is just the long tail of apps that you haven't installed yet. cc
@DavidSacks
Keith Rabois @rabois
@mims @anveshreddyj twitter will be for content. The web is going away because
laptops and browsers are.
The gist of the argument is this: as app-happy mobile devices become the primary
way we compute, the good old browser becomes irrelevant. The hyperlinked,
free-flowing, egalitarian, and ubiquitous world wide web will fade away. Instead,
digital existence will mostly transpire within the more self-contained domains
of individual apps, which offer their creators the flexibility and power of
building right into the mobile operating systems. We will still have the
internet, but it won’t be the same wherever you use it. And some will have more
power over it than others.
In the WIRED cover story “The Web Is Dead,” former editor-in-chief Chris
Anderson said much the same thing in August, 2010:
Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world
has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the
Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by
the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t
crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are
increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but
because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into
their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen). The
fact that it’s easier for companies to make money on these platforms only
cements the trend.
More than three years later, the trend has only accelerated. Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg famously disavowed his company’s effort to build a cross-platform
mobile app in HTML5 — the lingua franca of the web — in favor of OS-specific
native apps. And many places in the developing world are experiencing a
phenomenon known as “leapfrogging,” moving straight from no internet at all to
the web-shy world of mobile, due mainly to the lower cost of entry and the
absence of the heavy physical infrastructure required to support broadband PC
use.
Large swaths of the world — and just about every elementary schoolkid today —
experiences computing mainly through native mobile apps. The browser is — at
most — just one of many ways of connecting. This does not bode well for the web
as a central venue of the interconnected life.
What we lose is openness. On the web, anyone can publish anything for almost
nothing, and it will look pretty much the same across a world of machines. This
was the original appeal that drove the web’s early growth. Maybe as a new
generation discovers that joy, the web will gain new life. It may not be as
popular as it once was, but maybe it will become as cool as it was in the
halcyon days of the mid-1990s, when anyone in the know felt like they had a
whole new world all to themselves.
Marcus Wohlsen
Marcus Wohlsen is a staff writer for Wired Business and the author of Biopunk:
DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life
Read more by Marcus Wohlsen
Follow @marcuswohlsen and @wired_business on Twitter.
----------------------------------
Leia na Fonte: Wired
[17/08/10]
The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet - by Chris Anderson and Michael
Wolff
[Obs: Ler na fonte para acessar os hiperlinks do texto
além de gráficos e figuras]
Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler,
sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the
getting. Chris Anderson explains how this new paradigm reflects the inevitable
course of capitalism. And Michael Wolff explains why the new breed of media
titan is forsaking the Web for more promising (and profitable) pastures.
You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During
breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps.
On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another
app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM
conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner
while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on
Netflix’s streaming service.
You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone.
This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the most
important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web
to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser
for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile
computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And
it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re
rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just
work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t
have to go to the screen). The fact that it’s easier for companies to make money
on these platforms only cements the trend. Producers and consumers agree: The
Web is not the culmination of the digital revolution.
A decade ago, the ascent of the Web browser as the center of the computing world
appeared inevitable. It seemed just a matter of time before the Web replaced PC
application software and reduced operating systems to a “poorly debugged set of
device drivers,” as Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen famously said. First
Java, then Flash, then Ajax, then HTML5 — increasingly interactive online code —
promised to put all apps in the cloud and replace the desktop with the webtop.
Open, free, and out of control.
But there has always been an alternative path, one that saw the Web as a worthy
tool but not the whole toolkit. In 1997, Wired published a now-infamous “Push!”
cover story, which suggested that it was time to “kiss your browser goodbye.”
The argument then was that “push” technologies such as PointCast and Microsoft’s
Active Desktop would create a “radical future of media beyond the Web.”
“Sure, we’ll always have Web pages. We still have postcards and telegrams, don’t
we? But the center of interactive media — increasingly, the center of gravity of
all media — is moving to a post-HTML environment,” we promised nearly a decade
and half ago. The examples of the time were a bit silly — a “3-D furry-muckers
VR space” and “headlines sent to a pager” — but the point was altogether
prescient: a glimpse of the machine-to-machine future that would be less about
browsing and more about getting.
Who’s to Blame:
Them
Chaos isn’t a business model. A new breed of media moguls is bringing order —
and profits — to the digital world.
by Michael Wolff
An amusing development in the past year or so — if you regard post-Soviet
finance as amusing — is that Russian investor Yuri Milner has, bit by bit,
amassed one of the most valuable stakes on the Internet: He’s got 10 percent of
Facebook. He’s done this by undercutting traditional American VCs — the Kleiners
and the Sequoias who would, in days past, insist on a special status in return
for their early investment. Milner not only offers better terms than VC firms,
he sees the world differently. The traditional VC has a portfolio of Web sites,
expecting a few of them to be successes — a good metaphor for the Web itself,
broad not deep, dependent on the connections between sites rather than any one,
autonomous property. In an entirely different strategic model, the Russian is
concentrating his bet on a unique power bloc. Not only is Facebook more than
just another Web site, Milner says, but with 500 million users it’s “the largest
Web site there has ever been, so large that it is not a Web site at all.”
According to Compete, a Web analytics company, the top 10 Web sites accounted
for 31 percent of US pageviews in 2001, 40 percent in 2006, and about 75 percent
in 2010. “Big sucks the traffic out of small,” Milner says. “In theory you can
have a few very successful individuals controlling hundreds of millions of
people. You can become big fast, and that favors the domination of strong people.”
Milner sounds more like a traditional media mogul than a Web entrepreneur. But
that’s exactly the point. If we’re moving away from the open Web, it’s at least
in part because of the rising dominance of businesspeople more inclined to think
in the all-or-nothing terms of traditional media than in the come-one-come-all
collectivist utopianism of the Web. This is not just natural maturation but in
many ways the result of a competing idea — one that rejects the Web’s ethic,
technology, and business models. The control the Web took from the vertically
integrated, top-down media world can, with a little rethinking of the nature and
the use of the Internet, be taken back.
This development — a familiar historical march, both feudal and corporate, in
which the less powerful are sapped of their reason for being by the better
resourced, organized, and efficient — is perhaps the rudest shock possible to
the leveled, porous, low-barrier-to-entry ethos of the Internet Age. After all,
this is a battle that seemed fought and won — not just toppling newspapers and
music labels but also AOL and Prodigy and anyone who built a business on the
idea that a curated experience would beat out the flexibility and freedom of the
Web.
Illustration: Dirk Fowler
As it happened, PointCast, a glorified screensaver that could inadvertently
bring your corporate network to its knees, quickly imploded, taking push with
it. But just as Web 2.0 is simply Web 1.0 that works, the idea has come around
again. Those push concepts have now reappeared as APIs, apps, and the smartphone.
And this time we have Apple and the iPhone/iPad juggernaut leading the way, with
tens of millions of consumers already voting with their wallets for an app-led
experience. This post-Web future now looks a lot more convincing. Indeed, it’s
already here.
The Web is, after all, just one of many applications that exist on the Internet,
which uses the IP and TCP protocols to move packets around. This architecture —
not the specific applications built on top of it — is the revolution. Today the
content you see in your browser — largely HTML data delivered via the http
protocol on port 80 — accounts for less than a quarter of the traffic on the
Internet … and it’s shrinking. The applications that account for more of the
Internet’s traffic include peer-to-peer file transfers, email, company VPNs, the
machine-to-machine communications of APIs, Skype calls, World of Warcraft and
other online games, Xbox Live, iTunes, voice-over-IP phones, iChat, and Netflix
movie streaming. Many of the newer Net applications are closed, often
proprietary, networks.
And the shift is only accelerating. Within five years, Morgan Stanley projects,
the number of users accessing the Net from mobile devices will surpass the
number who access it from PCs. Because the screens are smaller, such mobile
traffic tends to be driven by specialty software, mostly apps, designed for a
single purpose. For the sake of the optimized experience on mobile devices,
users forgo the general-purpose browser. They use the Net, but not the Web. Fast
beats flexible.
This was all inevitable. It is the cycle of capitalism. The story of industrial
revolutions, after all, is a story of battles over control. A technology is
invented, it spreads, a thousand flowers bloom, and then someone finds a way to
own it, locking out others. It happens every time.
Take railroads. Uniform and open gauge standards helped the industry boom and
created an explosion of competitors — in 1920, there were 186 major railroads in
the US. But eventually the strongest of them rolled up the others, and today
there are just seven — a regulated oligopoly. Or telephones. The invention of
the switchboard was another open standard that allowed networks to interconnect.
After telephone patents held by AT&T’s parent company expired in 1894, more than
6,000 independent phone companies sprouted up. But by 1939, AT&T controlled
nearly all of the US’s long-distance lines and some four-fifths of its
telephones. Or electricity. In the early 1900s, after the standardization to
alternating current distribution, hundreds of small electric utilities were
consolidated into huge holding companies. By the late 1920s, the 16 largest of
those commanded more than 75 percent of the electricity generated in the US.
Indeed, there has hardly ever been a fortune created without a monopoly of some
sort, or at least an oligopoly. This is the natural path of industrialization:
invention, propagation, adoption, control.
Now it’s the Web’s turn to face the pressure for profits and the walled gardens
that bring them. Openness is a wonderful thing in the nonmonetary economy of
peer production. But eventually our tolerance for the delirious chaos of
infinite competition finds its limits. Much as we love freedom and choice, we
also love things that just work, reliably and seamlessly. And if we have to pay
for what we love, well, that increasingly seems OK. Have you looked at your cell
phone or cable bill lately?
As Jonathan L. Zittrain puts it in The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop
It, “It is a mistake to think of the Web browser as the apex of the PC’s
evolution.” Today the Internet hosts countless closed gardens; in a sense, the
Web is an exception, not the rule.
The truth is that the Web has always had two faces. On the one hand, the
Internet has meant the breakdown of incumbent businesses and traditional power
structures. On the other, it’s been a constant power struggle, with many
companies banking their strategy on controlling all or large chunks of the TCP/IP-fueled
universe. Netscape tried to own the homepage; Amazon.com tried to dominate
retail; Yahoo, the navigation of the Web.
Google was the endpoint of this process: It may represent open systems and
leveled architecture, but with superb irony and strategic brilliance it came to
almost completely control that openness. It’s difficult to imagine another
industry so thoroughly subservient to one player. In the Google model, there is
one distributor of movies, which also owns all the theaters. Google, by managing
both traffic and sales (advertising), created a condition in which it was
impossible for anyone else doing business in the traditional Web to be bigger
than or even competitive with Google. It was the imperial master over the
world’s most distributed systems. A kind of Rome.
In an analysis that sees the Web, in the description of Interactive Advertising
Bureau president Randall Rothenberg, as driven by “a bunch of megalomaniacs who
want to own the entirety of the world,” it is perhaps inevitable that some of
those megalomaniacs began to see replicating Google’s achievement as their
fundamental business challenge. And because Google so dominated the Web, that
meant building an alternative to the Web.
People
Enter Facebook. The site began as a free but closed system. It required not just
registration but an acceptable email address (from a university, or later, from
any school). Google was forbidden to search through its servers. By the time it
opened to the general public in 2006, its clublike, ritualistic, highly
regulated foundation was already in place. Its very attraction was that it was a
closed system. Indeed, Facebook’s organization of information and relationships
became, in a remarkably short period of time, a redoubt from the Web — a simpler,
more habit-forming place. The company invited developers to create games and
applications specifically for use on Facebook, turning the site into a
full-fledged platform. And then, at some critical-mass point, not just in terms
of registration numbers but of sheer time spent, of habituation and loyalty,
Facebook became a parallel world to the Web, an experience that was vastly
different and arguably more fulfilling and compelling and that consumed the time
previously spent idly drifting from site to site. Even more to the point,
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg possessed a clear vision of empire: one in
which the developers who built applications on top of the platform that his
company owned and controlled would always be subservient to the platform itself.
It was, all of a sudden, not just a radical displacement but also an
extraordinary concentration of power. The Web of countless entrepreneurs was
being overshadowed by the single entrepreneur-mogul-visionary model, a ruthless
paragon of everything the Web was not: rigid standards, high design, centralized
control.
Striving megalomaniacs like Zuckerberg weren’t the only ones eager to topple
Google’s model of the open Web. Content companies, which depend on advertising
to fund the creation and promulgation of their wares, appeared to be losing
faith in their ability to do so online. The Web was built by engineers, not
editors. So nobody paid much attention to the fact that HTML-constructed Web
sites — the most advanced form of online media and design — turned out to be a
pretty piss-poor advertising medium.
For quite a while this was masked by the growth of the audience share, followed
by an ever-growing ad-dollar share, until, about two years ago, things started
to slow down. The audience continued to grow at a ferocious rate — about 35
percent of all our media time is now spent on the Web — but ad dollars weren’t
keeping pace. Online ads had risen to some 14 percent of consumer advertising
spending but had begun to level off. (In contrast, TV — which also accounts for
35 percent of our media time, gets nearly 40 percent of ad dollars.)
Monopolies are actually even more likely in highly networked markets like the
online world. The dark side of network effects is that rich nodes get richer.
Metcalfe’s law, which states that the value of a network increases in proportion
to the square of connections, creates winner-take-all markets, where the gap
between the number one and number two players is typically large and growing.
Platforms
So what took so long? Why wasn’t the Web colonized by monopolists a decade ago?
Because it was in its adolescence then, still innovating quickly with a fresh
and growing population of users always looking for something new. Network-driven
domination was short-lived. Friendster got huge while social networking was in
its infancy, and fickle consumers were still keen to experiment with the next
new thing. They found another shiny service and moved on, just as they had
abandoned SixDegrees.com before it. In the expanding universe of the early Web,
AOL’s walled garden couldn’t compete with what was outside the walls, and so the
walls fell.
But the Web is now 18 years old. It has reached adulthood. An entire generation
has grown up in front of a browser. The exploration of a new world has turned
into business as usual. We get the Web. It’s part of our life. And we just want
to use the services that make our life better. Our appetite for discovery slows
as our familiarity with the status quo grows.
Blame human nature. As much as we intellectually appreciate openness, at the end
of the day we favor the easiest path. We’ll pay for convenience and reliability,
which is why iTunes can sell songs for 99 cents despite the fact that they are
out there, somewhere, in some form, for free. When you are young, you have more
time than money, and LimeWire is worth the hassle. As you get older, you have
more money than time. The iTunes toll is a small price to pay for the simplicity
of just getting what you want. The more Facebook becomes part of your life, the
more locked in you become. Artificial scarcity is the natural goal of the
profit-seeking.
What’s more, there was the additionally sobering and confounding fact that an
online consumer continued to be worth significantly less than an offline one.
For a while, this was seen as inevitable right-sizing: Because everything online
could be tracked, advertisers no longer had to pay to reach readers who never
saw their ads. You paid for what you got.
Unfortunately, what you got wasn’t much. Consumers weren’t motivated by display
ads, as evidenced by the share of the online audience that bothered to click on
them. (According to a 2009 comScore study, only 16 percent of users ever click
on an ad, and 8 percent of users accounted for 85 percent of all clicks.) The
Web might generate some clicks here and there, but you had to aggregate millions
and millions of them to make any money (which is what Google, and basically
nobody else, was able to do). And the Web almost perversely discouraged the kind
of systematized, coordinated, focused attention upon which brands are built —
the prime, or at least most lucrative, function of media.
What’s more, this medium rendered powerless the marketers and agencies that
might have been able to turn this chaotic mess into an effective selling tool —
the same marketers and professional salespeople who created the formats (the
variety shows, the 30- second spots, the soap operas) that worked so well in
television and radio. Advertising powerhouse WPP, for instance, with its
colossal network of marketing firms — the same firms that had shaped traditional
media by matching content with ads that moved the nation — may still represent a
large share of Google’s revenue, but it pales next to the greater population of
individual sellers that use Google’s AdWords and AdSense programs.
There is an analogy to the current Web in the first era of the Internet. In the
1990s, as it became clear that digital networks were the future, there were two
warring camps. One was the traditional telcos, on whose wires these feral bits
of the young Internet were being sent. The telcos argued that the messy
protocols of TCP/IP — all this unpredictable routing and those lost packets
requiring resending — were a cry for help. What consumers wanted were
“intelligent” networks that could (for a price) find the right path and
provision the right bandwidth so that transmissions would flow uninterrupted.
Only the owners of the networks could put the intelligence in place at the right
spots, and thus the Internet would become a value-added service provided by the
AT&Ts of the world, much like ISDN before it. The rallying cry was “quality of
service” (QoS). Only telcos could offer it, and as soon as consumers demanded
it, the telcos would win.
The opposing camp argued for “dumb” networks. Rather than cede control to the
telcos to manage the path that bits took, argued its proponents, just treat the
networks as dumb pipes and let TCP/IP figure out the routing. So what if you
have to resend a few times, or the latency is all over the place. Just keep
building more capacity — “overprovision bandwidth” — and it will be Good Enough.
On the underlying Internet itself, Good Enough has won. We stare at the spinning
buffering disks on our YouTube videos rather than accept the Faustian bargain of
some Comcast/Google QoS bandwidth deal that we would invariably end up paying
more for. Aside from some corporate networks, dumb pipes are what the world
wants from telcos. The innovation advantages of an open marketplace outweigh the
limited performance advantages of a closed system.
But the Web is a different matter. The marketplace has spoken: When it comes to
the applications that run on top of the Net, people are starting to choose
quality of service. We want TweetDeck to organize our Twitter feeds because it’s
more convenient than the Twitter Web page. The Google Maps mobile app on our
phone works better in the car than the Google Maps Web site on our laptop. And
we’d rather lean back to read books with our Kindle or iPad app than lean
forward to peer at our desktop browser.
At the application layer, the open Internet has always been a fiction. It was
only because we confused the Web with the Net that we didn’t see it. The rise of
machine-to-machine communications — iPhone apps talking to Twitter APIs — is all
about control. Every API comes with terms of service, and Twitter, Amazon.com,
Google, or any other company can control the use as they will. We are choosing a
new form of QoS: custom applications that just work, thanks to cached content
and local code. Every time you pick an iPhone app instead of a Web site, you are
voting with your finger: A better experience is worth paying for, either in cash
or in implicit acceptance of a non-Web standard.
One result of the relative lack of influence of professional salespeople and
hucksters — the democratization of marketing, if you will — is that advertising
on the Web has not developed in the subtle and crafty and controlling ways it
did in other mediums. The ineffectual banner ad, created (indeed by the founders
of this magazine) in 1994 — and never much liked by anyone in the marketing
world — still remains the foundation of display advertising on the Web.
And then there’s the audience.
At some never-quite-admitted level, the Web audience, however measurable, is
nevertheless a fraud. Nearly 60 percent of people find Web sites from search
engines, much of which may be driven by SEO, or “search engine optimization” — a
new-economy acronym that refers to gaming Google’s algorithm to land top results
for hot search terms. In other words, many of these people have been essentially
corralled into clicking a random link and may have no idea why they are visiting
a particular site — or, indeed, what site they are visiting. They are the exact
opposite of a loyal audience, the kind that you might expect, over time, to
inculcate with your message.
Web audiences have grown ever larger even as the quality of those audiences has
shriveled, leading advertisers to pay less and less to reach them. That, in turn,
has meant the rise of junk-shop content providers — like Demand Media — which
have determined that the only way to make money online is to spend even less on
content than advertisers are willing to pay to advertise against it. This
further cheapens online content, makes visitors even less valuable, and
continues to diminish the credibility of the medium.
Even in the face of this downward spiral, the despairing have hoped. But then
came the recession, and the panic button got pushed. Finally, after years of
experimentation, content companies came to a disturbing conclusion: The Web did
not work. It would never bring in the bucks. And so they began looking for a new
model, one that leveraged the power of the Internet without the value-destroying
side effects of the Web. And they found Steve Jobs, who — rumor had it — was
working on a new tablet device.
Now, on the technology side, what the Web has lacked in its determination to
turn itself into a full-fledged media format is anybody who knew anything about
media. Likewise, on the media side, there wasn’t anybody who knew anything about
technology. This has been a fundamental and aching disconnect: There was no
sublime integration of content and systems, of experience and functionality — no
clever, subtle, Machiavellian overarching design able to create that codependent
relationship between audience, producer, and marketer.
In the media world, this has taken the form of a shift from ad-supported free
content to freemium — free samples as marketing for paid services — with an
emphasis on the “premium” part. On the Web, average CPMs (the price of ads per
thousand impressions) in key content categories such as news are falling, not
rising, because user-generated pages are flooding Facebook and other sites. The
assumption had been that once the market matured, big companies would be able to
reverse the hollowing-out trend of analog dollars turning into digital pennies.
Sadly that hasn’t been the case for most on the Web, and by the looks of it
there’s no light at the end of that tunnel. Thus the shift to the app model on
rich media platforms like the iPad, where limited free content drives
subscription revenue (check out Wired‘s cool new iPad app!).
The Web won’t take the sequestering of its commercial space easily. The
defenders of the unfettered Web have their hopes set on HTML5 — the latest
version of Web-building code that offers applike flexibility — as an open way to
satisfy the desire for quality of service. If a standard Web browser can act
like an app, offering the sort of clean interface and seamless interactivity
that iPad users want, perhaps users will resist the trend to the paid, closed,
and proprietary. But the business forces lining up behind closed platforms are
big and getting bigger. This is seen by many as a battle for the soul of the
digital frontier.
Zittrain argues that the demise of the all-encompassing, wide-open Web is a
dangerous thing, a loss of open standards and services that are “generative” —
that allow people to find new uses for them. “The prospect of tethered
appliances and software as service,” he warns, “permits major regulatory
intrusions to be implemented as minor technical adjustments to code or requests
to service providers.”
But what is actually emerging is not quite the bleak future of the Internet that
Zittrain envisioned. It is only the future of the commercial content side of the
digital economy. Ecommerce continues to thrive on the Web, and no company is
going to shut its Web site as an information resource. More important, the great
virtue of today’s Web is that so much of it is noncommercial. The wide-open Web
of peer production, the so-called generative Web where everyone is free to
create what they want, continues to thrive, driven by the nonmonetary incentives
of expression, attention, reputation, and the like. But the notion of the Web as
the ultimate marketplace for digital delivery is now in doubt.
The Internet is the real revolution, as important as electricity; what we do
with it is still evolving. As it moved from your desktop to your pocket, the
nature of the Net changed. The delirious chaos of the open Web was an adolescent
phase subsidized by industrial giants groping their way in a new world. Now
they’re doing what industrialists do best — finding choke points. And by the
looks of it, we’re loving it.
Editor in chief Chris Anderson (canderson@wired.com) wrote about the new
industrial revolution in issue 18.02.