Paris, Nov. 2: Twenty autumns ago, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, came up with a catchy name for a revolutionary project that aimed to open the Internet to the masses. “The World Wide Web,” he called it, and the image proved to be so evocative that, for many people, the Web has become synonymous with the Internet.
But now, two decades after Mr. Berners-Lee had his brainstorm, some people are predicting the demise of the Web. Even though the Web is merely one of many online applications, they add, this could be the end of the Internet as we know it.
“The Web is dead,” Wired magazine declared in a recent cover story. “The golden age of the Web is coming to an end,” wrote Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research. The Atlantic magazine warned of “the closing of the digital frontier.”
The argument goes something like this: After falling in love with the openness of the Web, consumers are recoiling from its chaos and embracing the sense of order offered by walled-off digital realms. These include applications for mobile devices like Apple’s iPad and iPhone and password-protected social networks like Facebook, where much of what people do takes place beyond the reach of search engines and Web browsers.
Meanwhile, advocates of openness fear that telecommunications companies want to build separate, Balkanized “Internets” of their own, where they control the content and collect tolls for traffic that passes through them. Some media companies are already putting more of their content, once freely available, behind pay walls, and lobbying governments to crack down on the free-for-all of illegal file-sharing.
Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard professor of Internet law, says that the growth of walled gardens like Apple’s applications store have threatened the “generative” character of the Internet, which has permitted users to build on what is already there, as with Lego toys.
“The serendipity of outside tinkering that has marked that generative era gave us the Web, instant messaging, peer-to-peer networking, Skype, Wikipedia — all ideas out of left field,” he writes in a recent book, “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.” “Now it is disappearing, leaving a handful of new gatekeepers in place, with us and them prisoner to their limited business plans and to regulators who fear things that are new and disruptive.”
Are matters really so dire? For the doomsayers, there are some inconvenient truths.
Every day, about a million new devices — computers, mobile phones, televisions and other things — are hooked up to the Internet, according to Rod Beckstrom, chief executive of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees the Internet address system. The total number of Internet users worldwide, about two billion, is growing by 100 million to 200 million a year.
Most of this growth is occurring in developing countries, where the Web is dominant and applications stores and the like have made fewer inroads.
The number of Web pages has grown from 26 million in 1998 to more than a trillion today, according to Google.
The Web has been better equipped to reach new corners of the world since the recent opening up of the domain name system to non-Western languages. North America, which once dominated the Internet, now represents only 13.5 percent of its users, according to Internet World Stats, a Web site that compiles such data, compared with 42 percent for Asia and 24 percent for Europe.
“Reports of the death of the Web have been greatly exaggerated,” Mr. Beckstrom said. “It’s going to be alive and kicking for a long time.”
While the Web is merely one of many applications that operate over the Internet, along with e-mail, instant messaging, peer-to-peer file-sharing services and other tools, it is the most familiar one for many people; almost anyone, anywhere with an Internet connection and a little bit of knowledge can view a Web page.
So as other kinds of Internet traffic have started to grow more rapidly than Web use, some open-Internet campaigners see a threat to the Web and, more generally, the Internet as we know it. Yet the distinctions are growing less relevant.
When you visit YouTube, for example, you are using the Web to sort through the available videos, while the video stream is delivered outside the Web, but still via the Internet.
Even if the supposed threats have been overblown, it is clear that the Web and the Internet are changing.
Mobile devices increasingly come with Internet access as a standard feature. Within a few years, analysts predict, more people will connect to the Internet from
smartphones than from deskbound
computers.