Does Steve Jobs kill the Web and the freedom of the Internet?

Today we organize our business and private live via the Internet. It’s the network of networks. If we need to find the next supermarket, gas station, doctor or pharmacy. There's an app for that. If we need a train ticket, find the next station and watch the timetable. There's an app for that. There's an app for just about anything, as Apple promises. A Brave New World!

Wired.com author Chris Anderson (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1) reminds us of the fact that the use of Internet has increased during the last years but the way we do it is about to change completely since the iphone started to conquer the mobile phone market three years ago. Besides the implications to the mobile phone industry the impact to the Internet is even more dramatic. Anderson detects that we spent the whole day on the Internet but not on the World Wide Web as we did over more than a decade. Why is that? First let’s have look to the history. The classical way of gathering information in the Internet was the to search the Web with a browser on a PC. Regarding to some open standards everybody could put his information or statements in the way he liked to the Internet application called World Wide Web on a server. Every user had the chance to view and read that information with a so-called web browser. These web browsers where just open readers without influence on the content. But we just could use the browse the PC at home, in the office or at some other fixed locations.

Now the number of the new mobile Internet devices such as smartphones and tablets is increasing extensively which means that that the old school PC loses its importance. The majority of the Internet connections will be via mobile devices. They also have a browser but because of the small screen size the most convenient way of accessing the Internet is by using nice little apps. The problem is that those apps just give access to very limited parts of the Internet for special purposes. The gatekeeper Apple decides which apps and which content is allowed. Who wants to be perceived in the Internet of the future has to follow the rules of the censors. The freedom has gone. Also the Web originator Tim Berners-Lee describes the threat of the freedom of the World Wide Web and calls for it’s defending. (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web)

Some authors contradict these accusations. (http://www.heise.de/mac-and-i/kolumnen/artikel/Macht-Apple-das-Web-kaputt-1147394.html) They say that Apple uses open standards such as HTML 5 on their devises. They also cannot find any censorship in Apple App Store. It is just a quality control that secures the quality und functionality of the software for the devises. Another argument is that people like Berners-Lee can deliver grandiloquent speeches since they don’t have a company that needs to earn money.

In my opinion there is some truth in this argumentation of Anderson and Berners-Lee. Since the Internet left the academic playground of the universities (about 1997) a fierce battle rages for supremacy on the World Wide Web. The main reason why the free World Wide Web survived that long is that the media conglomerates did not know how to create a value chain and convert it in another distribution channel for their classical entertainment media. Apples found this way by creating iTunes, iPod iPhone and finally the iPad. Apple attacks the „Two-Way-Web“ where everybody is both: author and reader, producer and consumer. In the case of the iPhone one could argue that the small size of the device just allows the use of the Internet by specially adjusted apps. But the much bigger iPad proves that the previous claims are right. The size of these tablets is big enough to use web browsers in a comfortable way. But Apple does not offer an open operating system for the iPad that allows the installation of the software the user want. Quite the contrary Apple even bans Adobes flash from the iPad, which makes the browser useless for many web sites. As a consequence the user need to look for an app in Apples store. In this “Brave New World” we are just consumers of digital content with a player instead of a computer in our hand.

Christoph M.