Welcome to Webland

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1 point·benjaminjosephw··2 comments

> In Webland, there are four massive cities called Amazonia, Appleville, Facetown, and Googlemore, and one-third – or 2 billion citizens – choose to live inside these cities, but they represent two-thirds of the economic activity of Webland.

Interesting (even if slightly cheesy) analogy.

I can't understand why we're still talking about the Open Web as an unambiguously good thing at this point. The principles sound solid but history has played out in very different way to any expectations of Open Web advocates. Does the logic of the Open Web really still make sense for today considering the current landscape?

The "Open Internet" is a badly defined concept. In it's core, though, are 'open standards and interoperability' - these are what allow people to communicate with each other. If we take this out, we're only one step away of fracturing the Internet into a Googlenet, an Amazonnet and an Applenet - we would be back at the dark ages of Compuserve and AOL.

The truth is: users are far less "citizens of walled gardens" as this article claims: You may have an iPhone, but you still order your books from Amazon. You may use Google Chrome to open Facebook. And you may learn about something on Facebook and go to a private website in the "open internet". Once you have one friend in real life who is not an Apple User, iMessage becomes surprisingly useless, and you will install Whatsapp.

The big four are not all-encroaching zaibatsu that can stand on their own - or even try to do so. Mere economic activity thus is an interesting statistic, but ultimately an useless one.

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