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Stephen Downes

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The War For the Web

Tim O'Reilly, Nov 18, 2009

Tim O'Reilly of dangers to the open internet. As O'Reilly writes (and I experience now, frustratingly, with my iPod), "The Apple iPhone is the hottest web access device around, and like Facebook, while it connects to the web, it plays by a different set of rules. Anyone can put up a website, or launch a new Windows or Mac OS X or Linux application, without anyone's permission. But put an app onto the iPhone? That requires Apple's blessing." And he is not confident of the future. "I'm betting," he writes, "that things are going to get ugly. We're heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it's more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill."

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
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