The Internet Is Closing

The Internet, perhaps the most important technological development of the past 30 years, succeeded unexpectedly. It started out in an experimental backwater, nurtured far from the mainstream. It was spawned with no business plan and with no CEO leading the charge. Instead, a group of researchers—nerds, really—had the very un-entrepreneurial idea to develop a set of free and open technical protocols to move data from one place to another. The PC, which I think of as a companion technology to the Internet, likewise groomed as the hobbyhorse of passionate nerds who (at least initially) shared their designs. Both the Internet and the PC were released unfinished, and because they were open technologies, businesses and inventors could use them as a springboard for innovation. New applications were deployed to use them without needing the permission of their vendors.

This kind of openness isn't found in cars, fridges, TiVos or any other major technology. It's what helped the Internet and PC succeed over more boring, predictable counterparts—proprietary networks like CompuServe and information appliances like dedicated smart word processors. However, now that PCs and the Internet have become mainstream tools, there's rising pressure to turn them into the appliances they defeated: to close them, in some cases forbidding outside tinkering altogether, and in others allowing it only under closely monitored and controlled circumstances. The Internet and the PC as wellsprings of innovation are living on borrowed time.

The new closed models that represent the likely future of consumer computing and networking are no minor tweaks. We face wholesale revision of the Internet and PC environment of the past several decades. The change is coming partly because of the need to address security problems peculiar to open technologies, and partly because businesses want more control over the experience that customers have with their products. The trend from open systems toward closed ones threatens the culture of serendipitous tinkering that has given us the Web, instant messaging, peer-to-peer networking, Skype, Wikipedia and a host of other innovations, each of which emerged from left field. It will produce a concentrated set of new gatekeepers, with us and them prisoner to their limited business plans and to regulators who fear things that are new and disruptive.

How is the Internet's openness moving from virtue to vice? In the pre-Internet days, mainstream computing and networking were closed activities. The business world produced expensive networking gear for use in office networks and offered pay-per-minute services, like AOL and CompuServe, for consumers. Firms were prisoner to whatever network vendor provided their hardware and software, and consumers found a limited set of groomed offerings from whichever walled garden they chose.

The Internet's flexibility soon outpaced both. Physicist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web by publishing protocols by which interested people could describe a "page" of content with links. Anyone could set up a server and offer content, and as the Internet began to accept connections with the public, choosing a network provider no longer meant locking oneself into a bundle of content. The Internet, with no plan for content or profit, ended up generating far more of both than proprietary competitors.

In similar fashion the PC became essential to mainstream businesses and consumers. Within two years of the introduction of the Apple II, which out of its box treated users to a blinking cursor awaiting further programming, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston had invented VisiCalc, the first digital spreadsheet. The PC was no longer merely personal. Word processors and smart typewriters couldn't keep up with a device that could be a spreadsheet one second and a database the next.