[opendtv] Proclaimed Dead, Web Is Showing New Life
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: OpenDTV Mail List <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2010 21:07:14 -0400
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/technology/01webwalls.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
October 31, 2010
Proclaimed Dead, Web Is Showing New Life
By ERIC PFANNER
PARIS - Twenty autumns ago, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer
scientist, came up with a catchy name for a revolutionary project
that aimed to open the Internet to the masses. "The World Wide Web,"
he called it, and the image proved to be so evocative that, for many
people, the Web has become synonymous with the Internet.
But now, two decades after Mr. Berners-Lee had his brainstorm, some
people are predicting the demise of the Web. Even though the Web is
merely one of many online applications, they add, this could be the
end of the Internet as we know it.
"The Web is dead," Wired magazine declared in a recent cover story.
"The golden age of the Web is coming to an end," wrote Josh Bernoff,
an analyst at Forrester Research. The Atlantic magazine warned of
"the closing of the digital frontier."
The argument goes something like this: After falling in love with the
openness of the Web, consumers are recoiling from its chaos and
embracing the sense of order offered by walled-off digital realms.
These include applications for mobile devices like Apple's iPad and
iPhone and password-protected social networks like Facebook, where
much of what people do takes place beyond the reach of search engines
and Web browsers.
Meanwhile, advocates of openness fear that telecommunications
companies want to build separate, Balkanized "Internets" of their
own, where they control the content and collect tolls for traffic
that passes through them. Some media companies are already putting
more of their content, once freely available, behind pay walls, and
lobbying governments to crack down on the free-for-all of illegal
file-sharing.
Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard professor of Internet law, says that the
growth of walled gardens like Apple's applications store have
threatened the "generative" character of the Internet, which has
permitted users to build on what is already there, as with Lego toys.
"The serendipity of outside tinkering that has marked that generative
era gave us the Web, instant messaging, peer-to-peer networking,
Skype, Wikipedia - all ideas out of left field," he writes in a
recent book, "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It." "Now it
is disappearing, leaving a handful of new gatekeepers in place, with
us and them prisoner to their limited business plans and to
regulators who fear things that are new and disruptive."
Are matters really so dire? For the doomsayers, there are some
inconvenient truths.
Every day, about a million new devices - computers, mobile phones,
televisions and other things - are hooked up to the Internet,
according to Rod Beckstrom, chief executive of the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees the
Internet address system. The total number of Internet users
worldwide, about two billion, is growing by 100 million to 200
million a year.
Most of this growth is occurring in developing countries, where the
Web is dominant and applications stores and the like have made fewer
inroads. The number of Web pages has grown from 26 million in 1998 to
more than a trillion today, according to Google.
The Web has been better equipped to reach new corners of the world
since the recent opening up of the domain name system to non-Western
languages. North America, which once dominated the Internet, now
represents only 13.5 percent of its users, according to Internet
World Stats, a Web site that compiles such data, compared with 42
percent for Asia and 24 percent for Europe.
"Reports of the death of the Web have been greatly exaggerated," Mr.
Beckstrom said. "It's going to be alive and kicking for a long time."
While the Web is merely one of many applications that operate over
the Internet, along with e-mail, instant messaging, peer-to-peer
file-sharing services and other tools, it is the most familiar one
for many people; almost anyone, anywhere with an Internet connection
and a little bit of knowledge can view a Web page.
So as other kinds of Internet traffic have started to grow more
rapidly than Web use, some open-Internet campaigners see a threat to
the Web and, more generally, the Internet as we know it. Yet the
distinctions are growing less relevant. When you visit YouTube, for
example, you are using the Web to sort through the available videos,
while the video stream is delivered outside the Web, but still via
the Internet.
Even if the supposed threats have been overblown, it is clear that
the Web and the Internet are changing.
Mobile devices increasingly come with Internet access as a standard
feature. Within a few years, analysts predict, more people will
connect to the Internet from smartphones than from deskbound
computers.
The popularity of applications for smartphones, often with content or
features similar to those available on open Web sites, could steer
more toward private digital gardens, like those that existed in the
heyday of online services like CompuServe and Prodigy.
"A walled garden is a place where everything looks beautiful, it
works well, and there are flowers everywhere," said Frédéric Donck,
director of public policy at the Internet Society in Brussels. "But
it's not the Internet."
Why? Applications available for Apple devices are subject to approval
by the company, which rejects, among others, those that do not meet
its guidelines for taste or decency. Some European newspapers have
had to censor racy photos to make their applications conform with
Apple's rules, which prohibit displays of bare female breasts.
"People don't think of their use of devices as a political act," said
Mr. Bernoff, the Forrester analyst. "They just think about whether
they are having an elegant, seamless experience. But do I really want
Apple deciding what kind of content is appropriate?"
For Internet users in countries like China or Iran, the idea that
there are limits to online freedom is nothing new. There, governments
routinely block access to Web sites that feature dissenting political
views.
Advocates of an open Internet worry that official oversight is on the
rise elsewhere. In Australia, the government has proposed a system
through which the Internet would be filtered to block access to sites
containing child pornography or other material that is illegal or
deemed to be highly offensive.
Movie and music companies, meanwhile, have lobbied governments to
crack down on digital freeloaders who engage in unauthorized sharing
of their content. Countries like France, Britain and South Korea have
established laws authorizing the suspension of persistent copyright
pirates' broadband connections, in an effort to get more of them to
become paying customers.
For advocates of openness, the nightmare outlook is one in which
telecommunications companies, allied with other corporate partners,
seize control of the Internet and run it in a way that maximizes
profits, rather than openness. This concern has fueled calls for
governments to impose rules to enforce "network neutrality," or equal
priority to all Internet traffic, regardless of the content.
"The Internet has become a truly global space where everyone, almost
everywhere, has access to the same information," said Jérémie
Zimmermann, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net, a group based in
Paris that campaigns against restrictions on Internet use. "I think
this is one of the most precious things we have ever built as a
civilization, and this is what is at stake now."
Others say network neutrality is a largely American issue, rooted in
a lack of competition among broadband providers, which fuels fears
that these companies might abuse their monopoly positions.
There are other signs that competition can keep openness alive. One
of the most successful of the closed systems, Apple's iPhone, is
already showing signs that it might be eclipsed by other, more
interoperable rivals. In the United States, sales of smartphones
using Google's more open Android platform recently overtook sales of
iPhones. Android phones also use applications, but unlike Apple,
Google does not screen them, and Android is open to competing
applications stores, like one planned by Amazon.
Even the idea that the desktop and the mobile Internet exist in two
different spheres may turn out to be merely a temporary phenomenon,
some analysts say. Much of the content in mobile applications is
scoured and repackaged from the Web - so, for now, at least, it is
difficult to argue that users of applications are really turning
their backs on the Web.
"If you go with the Web, the potential mobile audience is in the
billions. If you go with any of the smartphone operators in a closed
environment, it's a small fraction of that," said Jon von Tetzchner,
chief executive of Opera Software, a Norwegian company that develops
Web browsers.
"To me, it seems like the Web has been winning fairly big time."
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