Web inventor, Tim Burners-Lee pens an article for Scientific American that is an impassioned, yet reasoned argument for open standards and Internet Neutrality (Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality: Scientific American). By couching his argument in principles of liberty, he articulates many of the principles that underlie some of the problems I’ve seen in closed systems like social networking sites and mobile apps. Here are a couple of highlights that hopefully can stand on their own:
In these cases, no due process of law protects people before they are disconnected or their sites are blocked. Given the many ways the Web is crucial to our lives and our work, disconnection is a form of deprivation of liberty. Looking back to the Magna Carta, we should perhaps now affirm: “No person or organization shall be deprived of the ability to connect to others without due process of law and the presumption of innocence.” …
Some people may think that closed worlds are just fine. The worlds are easy to use and may seem to give those people what they want. But as we saw in the 1990s with the America Online dial-up information system that gave you a restricted subset of the Web, these closed, “walled gardens,” no matter how pleasing, can never compete in diversity, richness and innovation with the mad, throbbing Web market outside their gates. If a walled garden has too tight a hold on a market, however, it can delay that outside growth.
For some reason all of this reminded me that we’re in desperate need of a good mobile browser. I think that might solve some of the app-etite we’ve been suffering lately.