The Open Web (1990–2020)

I’ve just received this story from the future in my inbox.

INTERNET — The open web, which allowed an explo­sion of cre­ativ­ity and befud­dled many cor­po­ra­tions and gov­ern­ments died at 12 a.m. on the morn­ing of March 1, 2020. It was just short of its 30th anniversary.

The cause was can­cer, accord­ing to open stan­dards advo­cates. While it suf­fered from fail­ing health since the intro­duc­tion of the iPhone, and the suc­cess of closed sys­tems like Face­book or Twitter.

The off­spring of Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cail­liau, the open web showed early promise by sim­pli­fy­ing how con­tent on the inter­net could be accessed. Its birth her­alded an explo­sion of cre­ativ­ity that democ­ra­tized con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion and allowed large amounts of peo­ple to share their knowl­edge and inter­est with like-minded individuals.

In the 1990s, the open web expe­ri­ences a turn as rock star as it helped cre­ate mil­lions of new jobs and gen­er­ated new wealth for many individuals.

But two reces­sions took their toll. It was blamed for the first one and forced to go mostly into hid­ing for a large part of the first decade of the 21st cen­tury. Dur­ing that time, the open web reformed itself, focus­ing on mak­ing itself even eas­ier to use, and birthing blog­ging, pod­cast­ing, video and photo shar­ing. These con­cepts and sites related to them allowed mil­lions of peo­ple to post con­tent rang­ing from the inane to the highly intel­lec­tual.

The sec­ond reces­sion, how­ever, helped improved the open web’s rep­u­ta­tion as peo­ple real­ized that spec­u­la­tors were the guilty par­ties in both reces­sions. With its rep­u­ta­tion reha­bil­i­tated, the open web started flour­ish­ing again in the late 2010s.

Unbe­known to it, ene­mies of the open web were gath­er­ing strength and plan­ning its demise.

In 2008, Apple intro­duced the iPhone app store, pro­vid­ing a san­i­tized sub-set of the con­tent avail­able on the inter­net. Through 2010, Apple would con­tinue its attack on the open web, high­light­ing that iPhone apps were a bet­ter way to con­sume con­tent on the inter­net, while keep­ing those apps under tight con­trol through an opaque approval process. While many open web advo­cates screamed, the gen­eral pub­lic seemed per­fectly con­tent with the more restricted approach.

Mean­while, com­pa­nies like Twit­ter and Face­book cre­ated walled gar­dens on top of web tech­nol­ogy, clos­ing up access to con­tent that was cre­ated or used on their ser­vices. Cen­tral­ized on their own plat­forms, the ser­vices allowed to “sim­plify” user inter­ac­tion with the inter­net, while requir­ing reg­is­tra­tion and tight­en­ing con­trol as to what users could and couldn’t do with those services.

For the next decade, the num­ber of walled gar­dens increased and the web became increas­ingly balka­nized. By 2020, the open web was lim­ited to a group of roughly 1,000 web sites that were not acces­si­ble to the major­ity of inter­net users.