How To Break Open The Web

[Commentary] We rarely think about how the Internet works, how our data moves around the Internet. We need to, because this government-created, radically decentralized network of networks, which has spawned so much innovation at the edges, is rapidly being re-centralized. Control is being captured by and corporations and taken away from—or being ceded by—the rest of us.

What’s at stake here? In a word, permission. People should not need permission to speak, to assemble, to innovate, to be private, and more. But when governments and corporations control choke points, they also control whether average people can participate fully in society, politics, commerce, and more. Fast forward, through the emergence of giant web-centric companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Salesforce. We find ourselves in the silo era. Data and service silos hold what we do—our work, our play, our very thoughts— hostage, even as they provide genuine convenience and value in other ways. Mobile devices exacerbate the problem. Many mobile apps are essentially browsers that work on a single website. Add government and telecom control-freakery to the mix, and it’s all too easy to worry that we may already have lost.

[Dan Gillmor is an author, teacher, and longtime observer of the technology world. Kevin Marks is a software engineer who realized that human problems are the most interesting to solve. ]