A sad article, if ever there was one. This is about Google’s in-kind response to Facebook’s depressingly successful attempts to be a bigger and better AOL/Compuserve (amongst other things, through its ‘philanthropic’ internet.org arm, that people in developing countries afflicted with it sometimes think of as the Internet). The general idea is that Google will host content, rather than linking to it.
This is not the way the Internet should go, and this is not in line with Google’s avowed intent to not be evil. On the bright side, in real life, though poisonous and virulent, it is not the way the Internet really is going: the Internet is, ultimately, self healing, both in technical and in social terms. It might look like a fairly closed system to people that generally interact with it through Facebook or Google Search (or any of hundreds of thousands of other less successful attempts to lock people in) but it is heartening that WordPress dwarfs all of them put together in terms of sites and people that visit them (more than a quarter of all sites), and Worpress sites are, to a very large extent, controlled and owned by the people that run them. And that’s just the most popular content management system: the Web is many times bigger and more distributed than that, and the Internet is vastly bigger still. And, of course, Google is not the only search engine. You can find the rest of the Web in many other ways.
So, though the article claims doom and gloom all round, I remain optimistic that common sense and decency (or indecency if that happens to be your thing) will triumph in the end, and the game will never be over. A few successful parasitic corporations/applications – Facebook (including its subsidiaries like Instagram, Whatsapp, etc), Google, Apple, Amazon, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Microsoft, Pinterest, etc – are doing their darnedest to wreck the open Internet, and are definitely shaping much of it, killing open standards, and sucking billions of people into their locked-in lairs, but those billions of people are just a click away (often, from within those systems themselves) to what the Internet is actually composed of, especially the Web side of it. Sure, these are parasites that suck the life out of openness and diversity but, like all parasites, they would be more than foolish to kill their host. And, hearteningly, the network effect (especially the rich get richer Matthew Effect) works just as effectively in reverse, as any former MySpace or Friendster afficionado will tell you. Or AOL, for that matter.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.salon.com/2016/05/01/googles_new_media_apocalypse_how_the_search_giant_wants_to_accelerate_the_end_of_the_age_of_websites/
