My friend David Eaves has sounded on the topic of the open web as a social movement, you can see his posts here, here and here . He fundamentally believes, and rightly so, that the scope of action to ensure informational freedom on the web is greater than technology.
I do have some issues with a few pillars of his thesis however.
Firstly, “the open web” is a really bad term for a tonne of reasons - primarily its opacity, ambiguity and inaccuracy - this term is so niche that there isn’t even a wikipedia page for it and I’m not about to deal with the flame-trolling to write one.
So, I think Dave should have made his assumptions and biases regarding the open web more explicit, since one can’t engage him on the appropriateness of a method if one doesn’t understand his version of the results.
That said, one can make a logical inference, as to what David is referring with “the open web”. That it is, the maintenance of freedom of interchange, decentralized and undifferentiated control of protocols and user-agency with regards to service providers (e.g. competition).
Dave believes Mozilla is well positioned to be the go-to source for public involvement to retain and expand these freedoms. His reason for this is simple - Firefox is on a lot of desktops and when people use it, it’s a way for Mozilla to interact with them; and Firefox, more than most other open source software is something users elect to install.
While I understand David has strong organizational affiliations, as someone more interested in the principle than any particular agent I find handing over leadership to Mozilla for this sort of thing unsettling.
Firstly, very little of Mozilla’s assets were borne of idealism - neither Steve Case or Marc Andreesen are Richard Stallman. Let’s not forget that Mozilla.org came from AOL - not exactly fertile ground for an organization of open
Secondly, Mozilla is also by no means the bastion of web standards - it’s one VERY TINY member of a standards setting group. Standards to which they adhere at their leisure just like any other member (no browser, save Lynx, is fully standards compliant).
It’s also impossible to rationally by-pass technological expertise when discussing what amounts to regulations, policy and protocols of technology. When you do this you end up inventing the internet, or clogging the series of tubes.
The open web (to be both about openness and about the web) is to be about interoperable communications protocols and specifications. Some may take exception to this, citing various examples but I suspect their scope would fall outside merely the open web (if it’s not about the web it’s not about the open web it’s about open something-else).
What is the web? Well, it’s still basically a few things some geek in a physics lab cooked up to share documents. If you were to randomly pick a web server you’d likely find it’s running Apache, Linux and MySQL. Randomly find a user-agent and you’ll find IE.
Who do you think should be the one to keep Microsoft in its place? The companies or organizations whose products Microsoft must play nice with because they host the content IE users look at, or the product Microsoft wants to kill but can’t because the Department of Justice won’t let them.
It’s the same reason Microsoft doesn’t just disable Google in Windows - access to the competition by using Microsoft tools makes their customers happy.
So, David, my question to you simple. What would a closed web actually look like? How can this be changed by a consumers? How does Mozilla stand better equipped to handle this than, say, Google (WAY more than 15 million users) or the OSI or Apple (you want enemy of standards?) ?
I believe we’ve already GOT an open web, if you disagree, what’s missing? What needs to be “opened up” that can’t be? How are my choices as a consumer different then than now?