World Wide Web Facing Threat from Tech Companies Seeking to Play Gatekeepers

Two decades after its advent changed our lives, the world wide web, as we know it, faces a grave threat. Not from governments alone, but also from tech companies seeking to play gatekeepers.

The /b/ section at www.4chan.org is so extreme in nature that even web veterans squirm at the thought of going through it. Anyone can post virtually any picture here. Anonymously. It doesn't matter if the pictures are obscene, graphic or gory.

Yet, 4Chan, which was started by a 15-year-old in 2003, is an integral part of the world wide web. The large community at 4Chan mirrors the virtual world — lawless and anarchic in the traditional sense, highly innovative, funny and sometimes disturbing. Barry Newstead, chief global development officer of Wikimedia that manages Wikipedia, puts it succinctly.

"The internet has been giving ordinary people the voice and the ability to contribute content and ideas and opinions. Sometimes we use it to create pictures of funny cats and sometimes it's the world's largest encyclopedia," he says.

Until recently, it seems governments just noticed the funny cats. They left the web to its own devices. At the same time, the egalitarian ethos on which the web was founded — Tim Berners-Lee developed it and gave it away for free — kept realworld barriers, which corporations and people often put around their environment, away from it. In 2012, it looks like the honeymoon is over.

'CIVILIZING' THE NET

Perhaps the problem is that, for all its perceived flaws, the internet has worked wonderfully well. "Too well," says Jeff Jarvis, author of 'Public Parts', a book on internet culture. It has allowed people to create Google, Facebook, Hotmail, WikiLeaks, Wikipedia and thousands of other websites and services that have changed lives.

Last year Jarvis was in Paris, participating in e-G 8 called by then French president Nicholas Sarkozy. He heard the Frenchman's plans to "civilize" the web. "Nobody should forget governments are the only legitimate representatives of the will of the people in our democracies," said Sarkozy.

His sentiments are shared by politicians across the world, including in India. Just three days ago, Congress MP Shantaram Naik, aghast at the "filthy" comments on a website, said in the Rajya Sabha that the internet needs to be "purified". Different politicians and governments have different reasons. But regulation is growing. In the last few years, governments across the world have proposed or enacted laws (see box) that aim to "civilize" the web.

Why the urgency? Is the internet broken? Jarvis says it is not. "The net is operating no differently today than it was a decade ago. But we see so many efforts to fix it — to regulate it under the cloak of privacy, piracy, decency, security, and even civility," he says. "I believe legacy institutions, including governments, are waking up to the extent of the net's disruptive force… they are trying to control the net and govern the change it causes."

Sunil Abraham, director of Centre for Internet and Society, says that in the last two years governments have doubled their efforts to control the web. "During the revolutions in Arab countries last year, protesters mobilized themselves through Twitter and Facebook. Then there are Wikileaks and Anonymous. This has made governments and politicians jittery," says Abraham.

'WALLED GARDENS'

Excessive regulation is not the only challenge the web is facing. There is a more subtle, yet equally dangerous, threat from the world of apps. As smartphones and tablets get more popular, companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft have pioneered the concept of a centralized store to deliver programs and services to users.

Unlike the web, which makes it easy for anyone to access a service — and, more importantly, offer a service — the world of apps is a controlled one. Companies that control the app ecosystem act as gatekeepers. For example, Apple's guidelines suggest developers cannot offer apps that compete with the company's own services.

Then, there is restriction on the content that is perceived by Apple as pornographic, obscene, violent or racist. Microsoft and Google have a similar set of rules for their app stores, though Google's store is perceived to have more relaxed guidelines. Last week, Facebook announced it would open an app store.

Users don't seem to mind it. This has made the web virtually irrelevant on smartphones and tablets. According to a report by comScore last week, the web on mobiles is dead. The market research agency's study in the US found that smartphone users spend over 80% of their time inside apps and the web is accessed only occasionally. Now companies are bringing these 'walled gardens' into our computers. Apple introduced the appstore on Mac last year.

Microsoft, whose software powers over 90% of the world's PCs, will introduce an app store in Windows 8 later this year. Users are being gradually nudged towards a future where the open web may not matter at all. Companies say that app stores allow them to offer better computing experience to users. "With apps we can integrate software and hardware properly.

We can take care of cyber threats. We can make the content safe for kids and families," says Harish Vaidyanathan, who deals with app developers in India as Microsoft's director of evangelism. But Berners-Lee sees it differently.

"Some people may think that closed worlds are just fine," he wrote in an essay two years ago. "The worlds are easy to use and may seem to give those people what they want... But these closed, walled gardens, no matter how pleasing, can never compete in diversity, richness and innovation with the mad, throbbing web outside their gates."

Nations press Ctrl key
Regulation, globally, is on the rise

DRAFT COMMUNICATIONS BILL, UK
Proposes to give police sweeping powers to monitor web traffic. Canada's Bill C-30 and America's Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) are similar. UK also thinking of limiting access to porn sites by making it an opt-in feature

MONITORING SOCIAL MEDIA
India, Kuwait, Tajikistan, Vietnam, Tunisia, Pakistan are all trying to "civilize" web chatter

ACTA
Signed by 30 nations, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement aims at reducing piracy and copyright infringements

STOP ONLINE PIRACY ACT, US
Proposes drastic steps like DNS-level blocking of sites

THREE STRIKES
In force in France and New Zealand, the copyright law directs ISPs to monitor users for piracy and cut their connections after 3 notices. Last year, UN said three-strike laws violate human rights

RUSSIAN AMENDMENTS
Provisions introduced in civil law last year make ISPs responsible for copyright violation by users

LEY SINDE, SPAIN
Enacted last year, the law aims to prosecute those who share pirated material on the web and puts undue pressure on intermediaries

TIGHTER CONTROL
Several countries such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, filter and monitor the web to keep it "clean". Belarus, Iraq, Lebanon, Thailand, South Korea and Turkey have recently joined the club

... AND IN INDIA

Ever since India introduced a set of new IT rules in April last year, web activists have been up in arms. The rules put a lot of liability on intermediaries — such as internet service providers (ISPs) — for the conduct of users and make it easier for authorities to remove content from the web. Recently P Rajeev, a CPM MP from Kerala, moved a motion in the Rajya Sabha seeking annulment of the rules. Rajeev's motion is likely to come up for discussion on Tuesday.

Seeing a window of opportunity, web activists have kicked off a fresh campaign against the IT rules. Lawyer Prasanth Sugathan, counsel to Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC), says, "We do need laws but not the ones that the Indian government framed last year. These IT rules are plain arbitrary."

The SFLC is running an online signature campaign. And the Centre for Internet and Society has asked Indian web users to bombard their MPs with emails explaining why the new IT rules need to be scrapped. Sugathan says many organizations have joined hands for the cause; meetings have been held in several cities to raise awareness about the issue. Volunteers of one group called Save Your Voice protested through a hungerstrike at Jantar Mantar in Delhi last week.