Closed encounters of the Facebook kind

IDEA N^o 92

OPEN ARCHITECTURE

The Web was built on open standards. HTML, HTTP and URLs can all be used without permission or payment. As a result, it has become the most powerful resource the world has ever seen.

Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an open standard for the connection of computer peripherals to personal computers.

The primary principle underlying the success of the Web is universality. Anyone can make a webpage. Any content can be put on a webpage. Any webpage can link to any other. A webpage can be viewed at any screen size and any connection speed from any device connected to the internet. Anybody can access the Web from anywhere.

This universal accessibility is under threat. Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks do not want to share. They capture a huge amount of personal information – your name, age, gender, location, professions, skills, friends, likes and dislikes – but they keep it to themselves. Similarly, Apple’s iTunes store requires proprietary software to access it. You cannot access it from a browser, you cannot link to it and search engines cannot index it. This is a worrying trend. It goes against everything the Web stands for, everything that makes it the most widely adopted technology on the planet. As Tim Berners-Lee stated, ‘The decision to make the Web an open system was necessary for it to be universal. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.’ If the next stage of the Web – the Semantic Web – is ever to be fully realized, an open system is essential. Today’s Web is the most efficient tool ever made for publishing and distributing documents. Tomorrow’s Web will analyse and understand the data within documents. Without open standards, however, the ability to analyse big data harvested from across the Web is compromised.

Closed networks result in silos of data, and restricted and reduced innovation. As we all pay homage to the closed networks of Facebook, Apple and the Kindle, we erode the Web’s fundamental principle. If we are to fulfil the potential of the Web, open standards and data portability are essential. Without them it will become the iWeb, and only one company wants that.■

‘If the next stage of the Web is ever to be fully realized, an open system is essential.’

Before open standards were adopted for electrical wiring in the 1880s, many conflicting standards existed for wire sizes, colour coding and other design rules.