This article was taken from the October issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
You wake up and check your email on yourbedside iPad -- that's one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter and the
New York Times -- three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Spotify, play some games on Xbox Live and watch a movie on Lovefilm's streaming service.
You've spent the day on the internet -- but not on the web. And you are not alone. This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open web to semi-closed platforms that use the internet for transport but not the browser for display. It's driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing. It's a world Google can't crawl, one where HTML doesn't rule. And it's the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they're rejecting the idea of the web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don't have to go to the screen). The fact that it's easier for companies to make money on these platforms only cements the trend. Producers and consumers agree: the web is not the culmination of the digital revolution. A decade ago, the ascent of the web browser as the centre of the computing world appeared inevitable. It seemed just a matter of time before the web replaced PC application software and reduced operating systems to a "poorly debugged set of device drivers", as Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen famously said.
First Java, then Flash, then Ajax, then HTML5 -- increasingly interactive online code -- promised to put all apps in the cloud and replace the desktop with the webtop.
Open, free and out of control.
But there has always been an alternative path, one that saw the web as a worthy tool but not the whole toolkit. In 1997, wired US published a now-infamous "Push!" cover story that suggested it was time to "kiss your browser goodbye". The argument then was that "push" technologies such as PointCast and Microsoft's Active Desktop would create a "radical future of media beyond the web". "Sure, we'll always have web pages. We still have postcards and telegrams, don't we? But the centre of interactive media -- increasingly, the centre of gravity of all media -- is moving to a post- HTML environment," we promised nearly a decade and half ago.
The examples of the time were a bit silly -- a "3D furry-muckers VRspace" and "headlines sent to a pager" -- but the point was altogether prescient: a glimpse of the machine-to-machine future that would be less about browsing and more about getting.
As it happened, PointCast, a glorified screensaver that could inadvertently bring your corporate network to its knees, quickly imploded, taking "push" with it. But just as Web 2.0 is simply Web 1.0 that works, the idea has come around again. Those push concepts have now reappeared as APIs, apps and the smartphone. And this time we have Apple and the iPhone/iPad juggernaut leading the way, with tens of millions of consumers already voting with their wallets for an app-led experience. This post-web future now looks a lot more convincing. Indeed, it's already here.
The web is, after all, just one of many applications that exist on the internet, which uses the IP and TCP protocols to move packets around. This architecture -- not the specific applications built on top of it -- is the revolution. Today the content you see in your browser -- largely HTML data delivered via the http protocol on port 80 -- accounts for less than a quarter of the traffic on the internet...and it's shrinking. The applications that account for more of the internet's traffic include peer-to-peer file transfers, email, company VPNs, the machine-to-machine communications of APIs, Skype calls, World of Warcraft and other online games, Xbox Live, iTunes, voice-over-IP phones, iChat and Lovefilm movie streaming.
Many of the newer net applications are closed, often proprietary, networks. And the shift is only accelerating. Within five years, Morgan Stanley projects, the number of users accessing the net from mobile devices will surpass the number who access it from PCs.
Because the screens are smaller, such mobile traffic tends to be driven by speciality software, mostly apps, designed for a single purpose. For the sake of the optimised experience on mobile devices, users forgo the general-purpose browser. They use the net, but not the web. Fast beats flexible.
This was all inevitable. It is the cycle of capitalism. The story of industrial revolutions, after all, is a story of battles over control. A technology is invented, it spreads, a thousand flowers bloom and then someone finds a way to own it, locking out others. It happens every time.
Take railways. Uniform and open-gauge standards helped the industry boom and created an explosion of competitors -- in 1920, there were 186 major railway companies in the US. But eventually the strongest of them rolled up the others, and today there are just seven -- a regulated oligopoly. Or telephones. The invention of the switchboard was another open standard that allowed networks to interconnect. After telephone patents held by AT&T's parent company expired in 1894, more than 6,000 independent phone companies sprouted up. But by 1939, AT&T controlled nearly all of the US's long-distance lines and some four-fifths of its telephones. Or electricity. In the early 1900s, after the standardisation to alternating-current distribution, hundreds of small electric utilities were consolidated into huge holding companies. By the late 20s, the 16 largest of those commanded more than 75 per cent of the electricity generated in the US.
Indeed, there has hardly ever been a fortune created without a monopoly of some sort, or at least an oligopoly. This is the natural path of industrialisation: invention, propagation, adoption, control. Now it's the web's turn to face the pressure for profits and the walled gardens that bring them. Openness is a wonderful thing in the non-monetary economy of peer production.
But eventually our tolerance for the delirious chaos of infinite competition finds its limits. Much as we love freedom and choice, we also love things that just work, reliably and seamlessly. And if we have to pay for what we love, well, that increasingly seems OK.Have you looked at your mobile-phone or cable bill lately?
As Jonathan Zittrain puts it in The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It: "It is a mistake to think of the web browser as the apex of the PC's evolution."
Today the internet hosts countless closed gardens; in a sense, the web is an exception, not the rule. Monopolies are actually even more likely in highly networked markets such as the online world.
The dark side of network effects is that rich nodes get richer.
Metcalfe's law, which states that the value of a network increases in proportion to the square of connections, creates winner-takes-all markets, where the gap between the number one and number two players is typically large and growing.
So what took so long? Why wasn't the web colonised by monopolists a decade ago? Because it was in its adolescence then, still innovating quickly with a fresh and growing population of users always looking for something new. Network-driven domination was short-lived. Friendster got huge while social networking was in its infancy, and fickle consumers were still keen to experiment with the next new thing. They found another shiny service and moved on, just as they had abandoned SixDegrees.com before it. In the expanding universe of the early web, AOL's walled garden couldn't compete with what was outside the walls, and so the walls fell.
But the web is now18 years old. It has reached adulthood. An entire generation has grown up in front of a browser. The exploration of a new world has turned into business as usual. We get the web. It's part of our life. And we just want to use the services that make our life better. Our appetite for discovery slows as our familiarity with the status quo grows.
Blame human nature. As much as we intellectually appreciate openness, at the end of the day we favour the easiest path. We'll pay for convenience and reliability, which is why iTunes can sell songs for 79p despite the fact that they are out there, somewhere, in some form, for free. When you are young, you have more time than money, and LimeWire is worth the hassle. As you get older, you have more money than time. The iTunes toll is a small price to pay for the simplicity of just getting what you want. The more Facebook becomes part of your life, the more locked in you become.
Artificial scarcity is the natural goal of the profit-seeking.
There is an analogy to the current web in the first era of the internet. In the 90s, as it became clear that digital networks were the future, there were two warring camps. One was the traditional telcos, on whose wires these feral bits of the young internet were being sent. The telcos argued that the messy protocols of TCP/IP -- all this unpredictable routing and those lost packets requiring resending -- were a cry for help. What consumers wanted were "intelligent" networks that could (for a price) find the right path and provision the right bandwidth so that transmissions would flow uninterrupted. Only the owners of the networks could put the intelligence in place at the right spots, and thus the internet would become a value-added service provided by the BTs of the world, much like ISDN before it. The rallying cry was "quality of service" (QoS). Only telcos could offer it, and as soon as consumers demanded it, the telcos would win.
The opposing camp argued for "dumb" networks. Rather than cede control to the telcos to manage the path that bits took, argued its proponents, just treat the networks as dumb pipes and let TCP/IP figure out the routing. So what if you have to resend a few times, or the latency is all over the place. Just keep building more capacity -- so-called "overprovision bandwidth" -- and it will be Good Enough.
On the underlying internet itself, Good Enough has won. We stare at the spinning buffering disks on our YouTube videos rather than accept the Faustian bargain of some Comcast/Google QoS bandwidth deal that we would invariably end up paying more for. Aside from some corporate networks, dumb pipes are what the world wants from telcos. The innovation advantages of an open marketplace outweigh the limited performance advantages of a closed system. But the web is a different matter. The marketplace has spoken: when it comes to the applications that run on top of the net, people are starting to choose quality of service. We want TweetDeck to organise our Twitter feeds because it's more convenient than the Twitter web page. The Google Maps mobile app on our phone works better in the car than the Google Maps website on our laptop. And we'd rather lean back to read books with our Kindle or iPad app than lean forward to peer at our desktop browser.
At the application layer, the open internet has always been a fiction. It was only because we confused the web with the net that we didn't see it. The rise of machine-to-machine communications -- iPhone apps talking to Twitter APIs -- is all about control. Every API comes with terms of service, and Twitter, Amazon, Google or any other company can control usage as they will. We are choosing a new form of QoS: custom applications that just work, thanks to cached content and local code. Every time you pick an iPhone app instead of a website, you are voting with your finger: a better experience is worth paying for, either in cash or in implicit acceptance of a non-web standard.
In the media world, this has taken the form of a shift from ad-supported free content to freemium -- free samples as marketing for paid services -- with an emphasis on the "premium" part. On the web, average CPMs (the price of ads per thousand impressions) in key content categories such as news are falling, not rising, because user-generated pages are flooding Facebook and other sites.
The assumption had been that once the market matured, big companies would be able to reverse the hollowing-out trend of analogue dollars turning into digital pennies. Sadly, that hasn't been the case for most, and by the looks of it there's no light at the end of that tunnel. Thus the shift to the app model on rich-media platforms such as the iPad, where limited free content drives subscription revenue (see Wired US's cool new iPad app!).
The web won't take the sequestering of its commercial space easily. The defenders of the unfettered web have their hopes set on HTML5- the latest version of web-building code that offers app-like flexibility -- as an open way to satisfy the desire for quality of service. If a browser can act like an app, offering the sort of clean interface and seamless interactivity iPad users want, perhaps users will resist the trend to the paid, closed and proprietary.
But the business forces lining up behind closed platforms are big and getting bigger. This is seen by many as a battle for the soul of the digital frontier.
Zittrain argues that the demise of the all-encompassing, wide open web is dangerous thing, a loss of open standards and services that are "generative" -- that allow people to find new uses for them. "The prospect of tethered appliances and software as service," he warns, "permits major regulatory intrusions to be implemented as minor technical adjustments to code or requests to service providers."
But what is actually emerging is not quite the bleak future of the internet that Zittrain envisioned. It is only the future of the commercial content side of the digital economy. E-commerce continues to thrive on the web, and no company is going to shut its website as an information resource. More importantly, the great virtue of today's web is that so much of it is non-commercial. The wide open web of peer production, the so-called generative web where everyone is free to create what they want, continues to thrive, driven by the non-monetary incentives of expression, attention, reputation and the like. But the notion of the web as the ultimate marketplace for digital delivery is now in doubt.
The internet is the real revolution, as important as electricity; what we do with it is still evolving. As it moved from your desktop to your pocket, the nature of the net changed. The delirious chaos of the open web was an adolescent phase subsidised by industrial giants groping their way in a new world. Now they're doing what industrialists do best -- finding the choke points. And by the looks of it, we're loving it.
Chris Anderson is editor in chief of WIRED US. He explained how to build a drone in issue 09.10
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
