We’re heading straight for AOL 2.0

The biggest internet players count users as their users, not users in general. Interoperability is a detriment to such plays for dominancy. So there are clear financial incentives to move away from a more open and decentralized internet to one that is much more centralized. Facebook would like its users to see Facebook as ‘the internet’ and Google wouldn’t mind it if their users did the same thing and so on. It’s their users after all. But users are not to be owned by any one company and the whole power of the internet and the world wide web is that it’s peer to peer, in principle all computers connected to it are each others equals, servers one moment, clients the next.

If the current trend persists we’re heading straight for AOL 2.0, only now with a slick user interface, a couple more features and more users. I personally had higher hopes for the world wide web when it launched. Wouldn’t it be ironic if it turned out that the end-run the WWW did around AOL because it was the WWW was open and inclusive ended up with different players simply re-implementing the AOL we already had and that we got rid of because it was not the full internet.

The writing’s been on the wall for a while now.

35 Comments

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