Communications of the ACM
The Death of the Open Web
The Web is a teeming commercial city. It's haphazardly planned. Its public spaces are mobbed, and signs of urban decay abound in broken links and abandoned projects. Malware and spam have turned living conditions in many quarters unsafe and unsanitary. Bullies and hucksters roam the streets. An entrenched population of rowdy, polyglot rabble seems to dominate major sites.
People who find the Web distasteful—ugly, uncivilized—have nonetheless been forced to live there: it’s the place to go for jobs, resources, services, social life, the future. But now, with the purchase of an iPhone or an iPad, there’s a way out, an orderly suburb that lets you sample the Web’s opportunities without having to mix with the riffraff. This suburb is defined by apps from the glittering App Store: neat, cute homes far from the Web city center, out in pristine Applecrest Estates. In the migration of dissenters from the “open” Web to pricey and secluded apps, we’re witnessing urban decentralization, suburbanization, and the online equivalent of white flight.
The parallels between what happened to cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New York in the 20th century and what’s happening on the Internet since the introduction of the App Store are striking. Like the great modern American cities, the Web was founded on equal parts opportunism and idealism. Over the years, nerds, students, creeps, outlaws, rebels, moms, fans, church mice, good-time Charlies, middle managers, senior citizens, starlets, presidents and corporate predators all made their home on the Web. In spite of a growing consensus about the dangers of Web vertigo and the importance of curation, there were surprisingly few “walled gardens” online—like the one Facebook purports to (but does not really) represent.
But a kind of virtual redlining is now under way. The Webtropolis is being stratified.
From The New York Times
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Comments
Santosh Kalwar
Dear NYT,
Yes, it is the bitter truth that web has been used by eeryone and was build for everyone.
It has become the place for every celebrity and every entity as you have pointed out.
However, we must not forget our histroy lesson. The history has taught us that with every new technolgies, there is boom and after certain time period, it reaches rises, it rises so hight that is can touch the sky, nevertheless, it also has to fall down because soon, there will be something extraordinary which could be used.
Hopefully, in the near future !
Thank you !
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