The Walled, Walled Web

Good article by Tim O'Reilly on the strong trends by various players to try and re-wall the Web - firstly by players with monopolies :

The Apple iPhone is the hottest web access device around, and like Facebook, while it connects to the web, it plays by a different set of rules. Anyone can put up a website, or launch a new Windows or Mac OS X or Linux application, without anyone's permission. But put an app onto the iPhone? That requires Apple's blessing.

There is one glaring loophole: anyone can create a web application, which any user can save as clickable application on their phone. But these web applications have limits - there are key capabilities of the phone that are not accessible to web applications. HTML 5 can introduce all the new application-like features it wants, but they will work only for web applications, and can't access key aspects of the phone with Apple's permission. And as we saw earlier this year with Apple's rejection of the Google Voice application, Apple isn't shy about blocking applications that it considers threatening to their core business, or that of their partners.

He also covers the Google/News International spat:

And now, of course, we see the latest salvo in the war against the accepted rules of interoperability on the web: Rupert Murdoch's threat to take the Wall Street Journal out of the Google search index. While most people have repeated the existing wisdom that to do so would be suicide for the Journal, a few contrarian observers have noted the leverage Murdoch holds. Mark Cuban argues that Twitter now trumps search engines when it comes to breaking news. Even more provocatively, Jason Calacanis suggested, a few weeks before Murdoch's announcement, that all big media companies need to do to cut Google off at the knees would be to block Google, while cutting an exclusive deal with Bing to be found only in Microsoft's search index.

Of course, Google wouldn't take that lying down, and would likely make its own exclusive deals, leading to a showdown that would make the browser wars of the 90s seem tame.

In fact, we've been arguing for a while that the hoo-hah over Net Neutrality is overdone, and the real emerging monopolists are upstream at the aggregation level (Google Neutrailty anyone?) and downstream at the device level. News International can be seen as a Content player trying to fight free of Aggregator monopoly (and form its own little power base, of course). Now to an extent this has all happened before.

To explain, if I may - at the top of this post is a good old 4-market model. In the 1990's the Internet came out tops over a bunch of walled Online Service Providers (OSPs) who were trying to be monopolists (or at least warring oligopolists) at the Aggregation Layer. But it won only because of some strong forces helping it.

Firstly the distributors - Telcos (those people everyone accuses of Net Un-neutrality now) were totally neutral in allowing anyone with a modem to connect to anyone. Secondly, at the time the main consumer device players (Apple, Microsoft) were provider-neutral in that they allowed you to connect to AOL or Prodigy or the 'Net. Thirdly, content was neutral in that AOL et al - despite trying - could not lock up the content online.

The issue now is that the monopolist forces are operating at the aggregation layer again, but also trying to build end to end walled gardens, from content to device. (Think Apple i-Series, Google's various forays from content to mobile phone)

Now Tim thinks that Microsoft will play the role of Open champion, when he says:

P.S. One prediction: Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.

He also mentions IBM - they too would probably be better off with the Open web. In fact, the Distribution players - those guys the Net Neutralists love to hate - may well prove to be part of the Good Guys in this scenario as their interests align more with those who want to keep the device and aggregation levels open.

But I suspect that strong legislation - and a lot of user campaigning the like of which would make the Net Neutrality debate look like a coffee morning - is also required. But forewarned, as they say, is forearmed.