“The problem is that the Internet was originally meant to be free and open, but as of now, people are willingly handing it over to private companies.”
Dave Winer explains, “They make a wide variety of colorful and fun cages for hamsters that are designed to keep the hamster, and their human owners, entertained for hours. When you get tired of one, you can buy another.
“It’s looks great until you realize one day, that you can’t get out! That’s the whole point of a cage.”
Tim Berners-Lee criticized companies that opt to build mobile or desktop applications, such as Apple’s iTunes or smartphone apps, rather than create apps that sit on the web alongside other websites.
“Open standards drive innovation,” he said, adding that the tendency for publishers to create apps for smartphones such as the iPhone is “disturbing”.
“The iTunes world is centralized and walled off,” he added. “You are trapped in a single store, rather than being on the open marketplace. For all the store’s wonderful features, its evolution is limited to what one company thinks up.
“Other companies are also creating closed worlds. The tendency for magazines, for example, to produce smartphone ‘apps’ rather than web apps is disturbing, because that material is off the web.”
You see, roughly 60% of iPad usage is business pipes and business pipes are walled off.
The trend is ominous. What IS the Internet when 80%, 90%, 100% of usage is corporate?
