![]() ![]() Since then, with the aggressive development of Apple’s App Store, Facebook’s strategic acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, and many other protectionist moves that have made tech’s most dominant companies even more powerful, the web’s fragmented islands-or “walled gardens,” as Berners-Lee also called them-have grown only more secluded.īut lately, a funny thing has happened. “For all the store’s wonderful features, its evolution is limited to what one company thinks up.” “You are trapped in a single store, rather than being on the open marketplace,” Berners-Lee wrote. On Apple’s island, Berners-Lee explained, iTunes users can tap into an immense catalog of music but can’t easily share it with anyone. The logic extends to other tech platforms too. The more they do these things, the harder leaving becomes-so much of people’s digital life is nested in Facebook, rather than in Facebook’s rivals. Once captive, users upload photos, add friends, send messages, click ads, and react to posts, all the while leaving a trail of information from which Facebook can profit. On Facebook’s island, he wrote, people give over their entire digital life for the chance to connect with their friends, but have no way to transfer their information to any other platform. “Because the Web is yours.” These companies, he warned, were restructuring the web itself, turning an expanse of interconnected websites all built on the same open infrastructure into a series of “fragmented islands” where users were kept hostage. ![]() “Why should you care?” Tim Berners-Lee wrote at the time. More than a decade ago, in a prescient essay for Scientific American, the inventor of the World Wide Web denounced what Facebook and other tech giants were doing to his signature invention. ![]()
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