Who Will Win Control of the Web? 206
Barence writes "Control of the web is up for grabs. Each of the big three computing companies – Microsoft, Apple and Google – has its own radically different vision to promote, as does the world's biggest creative software company, Adobe. And HTML itself is changing, too. This article examines the case for each of the contenders in the war of the web and, with the help of industry experts, assesses which – if any – is most likely to emerge as victor."
How do we make sure? (Score:5, Insightful)
How do we make sure that nobody "controls" the web?
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How do we make sure that nobody "controls" the web?
Looks to me that the web is falling under the control of DHS. [thehill.com] We all know how much a threat bit-torrent search engines are to national security.
If this would have happened three years ago, Slash would have posted this article three times with 750 comments each talking about how Bush is a tyrant trying to seize and solidify power. Now in 2010, not a peep.
Re:How do we make sure? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Slashdot posted it yesterday: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/11/26/1450257/US-Government-Seizes-Torrent-Search-Engine-Domain [slashdot.org]
The same day as your link.
Slashdot may have political bias, but when it comes to tech, no party or ideology gets off the hook.
I'd sooner suspect your bias, for linking to TheHill, than Slashdot's.
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you mean the debunked scenario in the first comment?
slashdot may have political bias, but that doesn't mean people pay attention to when things are a hoax.
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"Slashdot may have political bias"
Speaking about political bias, peoples understanding of what reason is and how it functions is seriously incorrect on all sides.
Everyone on slashdot should see the following:
Clip from important part:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ [youtube.com]
Te whole thing on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOdJMuCreDA [youtube.com]
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Actually, Slashdot posted it yesterday: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/11/26/1450257/US-Government-Seizes-Torrent-Search-Engine-Domain [slashdot.org]
The same day as your link.
Slashdot may have political bias, but when it comes to tech, no party or ideology gets off the hook.
I'd sooner suspect your bias, for linking to TheHill, than Slashdot's.
Thanx. That one flew under my radar. Still, it mentions only one site that was taken over. THIS [torrentfreak.com] site contains an update that lists many more that have been taken over. And, NO, it's not TheHill.com.
But back to my original point. Shouldn't there be comparisons to Nazi book burnings or something? I know we would have seen that comparison made three years ago. I wonder what has changed since then.
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Shouldn't there be comparisons to Nazi book burnings or something? I know we would have seen that comparison made three years ago. I wonder what has changed since then.
Ah, the wonders of selection bias. Not to mention the standard confusion of Slashdot with a hive mind.
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Wow. You mean expressing my anger online hasn't permanently fixed the problem? This is an outrage!
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I think that says more about how many people are reading slashdot. Most of the stories here now have a paltry handful of comments, and what comments there are ... are trollish spew in nature. Very very few intelligent discussions here. This is the first time I've posted a comment here in ... a LONG time.
I think reddit has finally killed slashdot.
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I think reddit has finally killed slashdot.
Pretty much. I jumped ship to Reddit months ago. Between the perpetual obnoxification of the Slashdot interface, the stupidification of the Slashdot "editors" and their inscrutable logic in approving idiotic stories for the front page, and the hordes of trollish mundanes that have watered down the geek quotient, I hardly bother to check Slashdot anymore. Back when it was CmdrTaco posting cool dork/nerd shit he found on the internet it was pretty fun, but now... meh.
Re:How do we make sure? (Score:5, Insightful)
How do we make sure that nobody "controls" the web?
Make it unprofitable.
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Good idea!
(really)
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How do we make sure that nobody "controls" the web?
Make it unprofitable.
So . . . you want the government to manage it? :D
Re:How do we make sure? (Score:4, Informative)
So . . . you want the government to manage it? :D
If you remember your history, originally they did. None of this non-sense was happening until private businesses moved in and demanded government protection for their profit margins.
Re:How do we make sure? (Score:5, Insightful)
How do we make sure that nobody "controls" the web?
Make it unprofitable.
So . . . you want the government to manage it? :D
Well, the US government did fund about 99% of its development, mainly through (D)ARPA, the (Defense) Advanced Research Projects Agency. That seems to have worked pretty well. Furthermore, ARPA left most of the development to the academic community, which does a fairly good job of "unprofitable". They were interested in capability, not profits. The military took what they considered useful from what the academics developed, used it to build their own Internet with very few connections to the academic Internet, and left the academics to continue to play with their big, useful toy.
OTOH, since the Internet was commercialized, we see a lot of what we're talking about here: The primary interest of the for-profit world is maximizing their income from the Internet, while minimizing development and support costs. This is why, for example, it has taken so long to get wireless Internet. It has been built by the phone companies, whose interests lie in creating exclusive "walled gardens", in which they have control over what software you are allowed to run, because they want you to pay for every little thing (even when its authors are giving it out free). They also seriously limit independent developers, because they want you to pay the phone companies for the software, not the developers. (Sorta like how the music industry has so successfully claimed 99% of the income, given a small part to the top "artists", and given the rest nothing.)
If history is any guide, we should conclude that strict government control and management of the Internet is the right way to go, at least in countries where the government (or the military ;-) has the good sense to continue to view it as an academic playground. And, as ARPA did during the early development, we should restrict the corporate world to the role of suppliers of the components, with no control of what we do with the network.
The growing talk of corporate monopolies running big chunks of the Internet should be a serious warning to all of us. To see why, look at the phone system back when in the US and many other countries, you could only attach hardware purchased or leased from the phone companies to your phone line. For a century, this produced glacially-slow development. Then, in the US and a few other countries, the government changed the rules, and gave customers permission to attach "foreign" gadgets (that met minimum interface requirements) to their phone lines. Within only a few years, there was an explosion of new capabilities. This is what you'd expect when you enable competition, of course. But you can't have competition and development if your connection is controlled by a monopoly that's allowed to control how you can use their system. In the US, this is pretty much the situation with wireless phones right now, and as a result, the wireless Internet is seriously crippled here.
Phrases like "net neutrality" and "control of the Web" should be warnings to all of us that the corporate world is trying to take control and limit our use of the Internet to only what we've explicitly paid them for. Look at the anti-competitive ways that Apple's App Store imposes. Ask yourself whether you want Apple or any of the other big players to impose rules like that on all the independent software developers out there. Ask yourself whether you want one big "winner" to control the Internet like AT&T did the phone system for a century, and block almost all further progress.
This is a case where the classical "incompetence" of the government has worked to our advantage. Maybe we should keep it that way. Without it, we'd never have had the Internet. We'd only have a flock of small, vendor-specific networks. You'd only be able to communicate with people and sites approved of by your
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Look at the anti-competitive ways that Apple's App Store imposes.
I don't get it. Apple has rules for what you can sell in their store. Big deal. So does Walmart. So does Target. So does Home Depot. I don't have to shop at those stores if I don't want to.
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We needed a fundamental human right that says access to public information on the web should be accessible by anyone using any device.
As for Flash and Silverlight, they hinder development of the web by providing an easy way to do things or a way to do things not possible by DHTML/Javascript.
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Some people have a problem with form and function. If something works, but does not work as they would like, they get a tad grumpy.
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The web will continue to be controlled by the same people that have always controlled it -- us, the users. If a minority interest such as a company or government manages to exert unwanted influence on the web, whether that be a proprietary standard or unpopular laws, then the greater community will simply migrate the web to a new form.
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Continue supporting open source solutions. As long as Unix/Linux OSes remain the dominant systems and Apache the dominant server then proprietary solutions will never win. The attempt of proprietary vendors to win is exactly what drives the community to fork and maintain open source. In the same way that BSD gave birth to FreeBSD, Open Office gave birth to Libre Office. I suspect Oracle will eventually force MySQL to fork in order to remain open but it has the momentum now to remain the dominant web DB. Fre
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Re:How do we make sure? (Score:5, Insightful)
Um. The title is absurd. You don't "control the web" by adopting open standards. None of these three is "controlling the web." If you want to look for someone controlling the web, look at all the legislation going around allowing governments to seize domain names, and treat traffic differently based on its source, and shut down peoples' access to the web based on mere allegations. That's "controlling the web."
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You seem to make W3C a victim here. It's not. Unless you count it's own inability to go forward.
HTML 5 is perfectly fine. // This line has exactly the same number of facts as yours BTW. That is 0.
It's not clear to me what's so backwards and messy either. While I like XHTML myself XML serialization is till there with HTML 5. As for XHTML 2... it got nowhere. Blame W3C.
Telcos (Score:2)
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He who lays the pipes.
The same answer to "who will pass on their genetic traits?"
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Put down that pipe and save the tubes.
Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Who Will Win Control of the Web?
You and I, silly people. Why are we deluding ourselves into believing only massive multinational companies can control the web, or that the government can control the internet, etc.? They are granted power because we give it to them.
If each of you here went over to 10 people's homes and set them up on something like Tor, and showed them how to protect their privacy and avoid malware and advertisement, executives everywhere would be protesting in front of Congress to stop those goddamned citizens from ruining their perfectly profitable business built on exploiting them. That, people, is power. And it is yours, not theirs.
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Unfortunately javascript, Flash, Silverlight, etc... can easily be leveraged to compromise your anonymity via Tor.
Oh noes! Someone might find out that my real IP address is 192.168.1.100!
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Hey, that's my IP address too you jerk!
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That's not mine; mine is 192.168.1.103.
So I'm two better than you guys.
Funny that... (Score:2)
Mine is the same as yours only mine goes up to 11.
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If each of you here went over to 10 people's homes and set them up on something like Tor, and showed them how to protect their privacy and avoid malware and advertisement, executives everywhere would be protesting in front of Congress to stop those goddamned citizens from ruining their perfectly profitable business built on exploiting them.
Yep and then when facebook doesn't work, or youtube is too slow. They will immediately stop everything they were just taught.
Tor is slow. Most people are too lazy to use ad-block or no-script.. that and it makes their web pages not work. Ive had people use my computer to go online real quick and the second facebook doesn't load.. "whats wrong with your computer?"
You are totally underestimating the power of stupid/lazy people.
Re:Answer (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a big if, though. The power structure of the world has and will always be a pyramid, and those on the bottom have always had the strength and numbers to overthrow those above it, yet a look at the past 20 years in Myanmar/Burma and Argentina are enough to show you that people still, after thousands of years, aren't always quick to do it. Something like the Magna Carta only happens so often, but when it does it's glorious. The real power in that document wasn't the power of the peasants or even the nobles to hold the monarchy accountable - after all, we've always had pitchforks - it was the establishment of an early set of bureaucracy. Companies follow rules for profit, the easiest way to win is just to play their game. Net neutrality is a good example of that - use an established bureaucracy against them. It's much easier to effect change as a small group of vocal lobbyists than a massive uprising. The average citizen wants their coffee and paper, to watch the game, and for the kids to behave. A technowhatsit spat over standards is about as boring as John Kerry's stump speech (that joke is six years old already).
Re:Answer (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, people are always reluctant for me to touch their computers and install privacy-enhancing software, until I show them how much faster their computer runs without malware, spyware, and pre-installed garbage. After I strip away all the advertisements they see on the web, they're utterly delighted. They want to buy me dinner, or hug me until I choke. They go from skeptics to supporters in a matter of minutes. And then I explain to them how I did it, and ask them to show their friends.
People come to me all the time now asking for the same services: How do I turn off advertisements on my internet? How to I get rid of all these popups trying to sell me crap? And increasingly, people are asking me how they can browse without the government knowing what they are looking at. See, people do read all this crap on CNN; They just feel powerless to do anything about it.
But once they have a community resource willing to show them, suddenly you've got the most unlikeliest of people knocking at your door. Traditional arguments about power and government hold little weight when I can show people how to push a button and make all the bullsh*t go away. No more tracking. No more advertisements. Bamf. Gone. All of it. They're free to use the public resource that is the internet with a peace of mind and just a smidgeon of anonymity and privacy.
And they do. Oh how they do.
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The power structure of the world has and will always be a pyramid, and those on the bottom have always had the strength and numbers to overthrow those above it, yet a look at the past 20 years in Myanmar/Burma and Argentina are enough to show you that people still, after thousands of years, aren't always quick to do it.
Actually, history is full of stories of the people at the top being overthrown by their "inferiors". But those people are human, too, so what they normally do is just step into their predece
Re: The question is biased (Score:5, Informative)
You and I, silly people. Why are we deluding ourselves into believing only massive multinational companies can control the web,
You are right that the Web belongs to you and I. And it goes further. TFA asks the question backwards:
Control of this new evolution of the web is up for grabs. Each of the big three computing companies – Microsoft, Apple and Google – has its own radically different vision to promote.
This question is biased. The Web has not been created by corporate entities and is not "up for grabs". The web has evolved out of the cumulative connectedness of public networks through public standards, which development is still overseen by the WWW Consortium. Attempts to privatize parts of it (eg. AOL) have failed and new attempts must fail if we wish to see the Web further innovate.
Read Tim Berners-Lee latest article. It articulates the questions facing the evolution of the Web so much more clearly:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web [scientificamerican.com]
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Sorry to reply to my own post, but to put Microsoft, Apple and Google contentions on the same plane is just wrong. Of these, only Google is purely a Web company, and is also the only one who defends the public standards that have made the Web, and its own existence, possible.
The other two are, indeed, grabbers.
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So that whole deal with Apple taking a GPL engine, enhancing it and developing it, and pushing HTML5 and CSS, and striving hard to ensure that Webkit passed the Acid Tests, among other standards compliance...
MS finally pulling its finger out with IE9 development, and decent HTML5 demonstrations, looking like it will at last be on a par with the other browsers for web standards.
That was all just a myth, right?
Google is not the only one promoting the public standards that have made the web.
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h264
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h264
Spot on!
What Apple is doing in the realm of video with h264 tells where Apple stands on open standards.
Google, one the other hand, is putting its money where its mouth is, with WebM and VP8, which have been released as open standards, without any tricky ambiguity.
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Wait... do you mean, like, go outside?
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The first thing you have to understand is that almost all large companies strive as hard as they can to remove the market from consideration - this is called "marketing" (as with most corp speak, it is newspeak, the opposite of what is intended). The goal of marketing is to make you buy stuff on silly things, like the label, rather then on what you need or what is best cost/price/function.
The second thing is that
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False: It's a Collective Action Problem (Score:2)
This is a myth. If it were true, the actions of the government would reflect the wishes of the majority. But it isn't true:
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The Gov't (Score:2)
Re:The Gov't (Score:4, Informative)
July: http://www.gamepolitics.com/2010/07/01/ice-seizes-website-domains-part-copyright-crackdown [gamepolitics.com]
Nov: http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/130763-homeland-security-dept-seizes-domain-names- [thehill.com]
Dec: ?
And in the UK its the police:
Mid-November: http://libcom.org/news/police-force-shut-down-fitwatchorguk-16112010 [libcom.org]
Late-November: http://www.techeye.net/internet/uk-police-want-power-to-shut-down-websites [techeye.net]
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Unfortunately the US government (at least in the US) has pulled ahead in terms of controlling the internet via seizure:
They've pulled ahead in terms of controlling one network resource: DNS. That does not mean control of the internet.
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It's a pain now. But if power is abused enough, we'll find DNS servers popping up that are alternatives for censorship-enabled countries like the United States and China.
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They're shutting down sites that help people infringe on copyright. Why do guys keep defending sites that are breaking the law? What logical progression goes from "shutting down sites that help infringe" to "mandate a government DNS"?
If you want to get technical, the government didn't "seize" anything? They updated a DNS entry. The original site, server, files, equipment, goods, etc. are still in the hands of the owner.
I disagree with the length of copyright and think the industry should make more things av
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They may not have seized the servers, but the government effectively DoS'ed them for 90%+ of their users at the behest of the ip cartels without due process. If they can do it to these guys with no repercussions or oversight, they can do it to some sight you do care about.
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Really? How does the progression from "sites dealing in counterfeit goods" to "sites with dissenting opinion" happen? What court is going to issue that order unless the accusers are lying?
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Let's be realistic here for a second and stop this bullshit skirting the law defense.
Go to torrent-finder.info and you'll see "high speed download" links for copyright infringing works. The "popular tags" all look like copyright infringing works. It is very obvious that they exist only to help people infringe on copyrights and make advertising money off of it.
While you may be able to do something similar with Google, but that is not the primary reason they exist.
How is securing a court order before changing
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I would defend the postal service if it got shut down because someone mailed illegal materials to someone else.
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And that's exactly why they can't shut down the bittorrent protocol or games and operating systems from distributing via bittorrent. That's why you don't see linuxtracker.org (for example) on the list of sites.
It's obvious that while the blocked sites encourage using a legal protocol, their primary function is to encourage it's use for copyright infringement.
You're too narrowminded.... (Score:2)
Most comments have not been in defense of copyright infringement, but opposed to lack of due process.
'LaminatorX' summed it up [slashdot.org] rather accurately for you.
If you want to get technical, the government didn't "seize" anything? They updated a DNS entry. The original site, server, files, equipment, goods, etc. are still in the hands of the owner.
That sounds a bit strange for someone defending IP[copyright] rights.
I mean, just how do you propose they seize a website? Smash in and grab the servers, etc.?
That only works when the servers are in your area of jurisdiction. To do that in the ontopic case, we would have to invade another country to seize the servers.
In this case, we updated the DNS entry t
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What exactly is due process when most of the organization exists outside of your jurisdiction? We can't arrest the owner or serve him to appear in US court. Yet, his actions are allowing US citizens to violate copyright laws. The only thing we have jurisdiction over is the .com DNS resolution, right?
So is not due process getting a court order and serving it to those in the US controlling DNS resolution for t
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Power (Score:2, Funny)
With great power comes great responsibility. Most of these big companies are missing at least one of those.
Me (Score:3, Informative)
Who will win control of the Web? I will. In fact, I already have it, and have had it since some time in the 1990s. And if some entity somehow takes that control away from me, I or one of my many fellow producers of web content will create a new Web, and we will use that.
Maybe I'm dreaming, but... (Score:2)
Easier to read article (Score:5, Informative)
Or you could go read the 'print' version which is all on one page and not 75% advertisement.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/363175/who-will-win-the-battle-for-control-of-the-web/print [pcpro.co.uk]
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Oh? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm pretty much talking out my ass but what is all this "control the web" nonsense? Isn't that precisely what we're 100% against?
And perhaps it's semantics + bad journalism. What they seem to be really asking - "whose technologies will gain the highest presence on the web?"
But that's not really "control" by any means.
Missing the point (Score:2, Insightful)
The web should be renamed the ebb for ebb and flow.
Right now, Facebook is taking over the web.
Soon, people will realize Facebook is just AOL without the free coasters.
It will be on to the next BIG thing.
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I hope Facebook dies.
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Could you and the GP explain what it is about Facebook that makes you so angry when others use it? Do you think that given an opportunity, you would bar citizens from accessing Facebook, possibly because you look down on them or think it is for their own good? Keep in mind no one is making YOU use Facebook; I am inquiring about your anger at others' usage.
Of course its ultimately the ...... (Score:2)
providers of internet access...
Hopefully Nobody. (Score:3, Insightful)
See post title, thanks.
Facebook (Score:2)
Almost no one really knows how to use a computer. Almost no one knows how to create a domain name and create content, even using one click installs of pre fab websites. Most people do not want to learn. MS is losing market share because most firms do
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I keep hoping someone will notice that HTTP is not the only Internet protocol in existence!
HTML has been stretched way beyond its original intent - to deliver static, stateless text-based documents. In the mad rush to push multimedia onto the net, someone decided that the Web browser is the proper platform for delivery
Hope (Score:2)
Simple Answer (Score:2)
Web applications (Score:2)
Create a web-application with Flash or SilverLight? With Acrobat?
I would rather say Apache, PHP, MySQL (PostgreSQL), JavaScript, GIMP, Notepad++, Firefox.
But how to do it with Flash, Silverlight, Acrobat, Apple-whatever? Will it work at all? Will someone use it?
Reality is Hardware (Score:2)
has to pay for that stuff
and he who pays, rules. Seriously, if yo have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in fiber optic cable, are you going to do anything that in any way interferes with your ability to make as much as possible ?
given the avg intelligence level of corp c suite excecs, that means many companies will t
China (Score:2)
At some point, there will be two 'Internets". One will be tightly c
too late (Score:2)
Yes I understand no one owns it and I agree, but based on the premise of the article, it's as if Google was in a war against its competitors in traffic control. The new "rivals" lost years ago. They can't suddenly "win". Something new is needed and it will take a long time for that to happen. Period!
I feel like I don't even see web pages anymore alr (Score:2)
Title seems wrong. We should be asking if we'll ever see the web again or if it will forever be buried under a layer of flash.
Google? Apple? (Score:2)
Too late, the US Federal Government seems to have already (re)taken control.
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Why are users so stupid as to hand control of the web over to *anybody*? Why are they so keen to support proprietary protocols, closed ecosystems, and single-vendor grabs for power?
Because it's easier. I know guys who are intelligent, capable engineers who buy Macs because "it just comes with everything they need, and it just works." I'm not really convinced they're in the wrong, either.
Re:why are its users so stupid? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm one of those engineers.
I ran windows for a long time and got sick of the crappy OS and security so poor 50% of the CPU power is dedicated to preventing me from getting hacked.
Then I ran Ubuntu for a few years. This time I got tired of the completely crappy/inconsistent interfaces, and having to spend way too much of my time being a sysadmin.
Now I've got a Mac. It's nicely designed, I don't have to mess with it, and I've got a Unix-variant at my fingertips when I'm feeling that command-line itch. I still have to deal with lack of software due to Windows dominance, but I'm learning to live without some stuff.
All of this is on my home machine. At work where I need the real thing it's vterms to a Unix box, baby.
Having said that, I did this because it was MY CHOICE. I didn't hand control over to anyone. I can install just about any software I care to on this machine and Steve Jobs is not going to show up with a baseball bat. OSS paranoia about the big bad corporations coming to steal your compilers doesn't help anything.
Of course not... (Score:2)
and Steve Jobs is not going to show up with a baseball bat.>
Everyone knows he uses an iPhone for that. [hijinksensue.com]
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I can install just about any software I care to on this machine and Steve Jobs is not going to show up with a baseball bat.
Not yet. However, if a critical mass of people are willing to accept the locked down iOS model for their laptop/desktop machines as well, then there you go. It is not paranoia. It is simply a matter of acknowledging that in free markets, businesses target the "average person".
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Re:None of the above (Score:4, Funny)
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I believe they said "worlds largest creative software company"
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They're changing DNS entries for sites that primarily exist to help people break the law.
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