By Christopher Mims
The Web--that thin veneer of human-readable design on top of the
machine babble that constitutes the Internet--is dying. And the way
it's dying has farther-reaching implications than almost anything
else in technology today.
Think about your mobile phone. All those little chiclets on your
screen are apps, not websites, and they work in ways that are
fundamentally different from the way the Web does.
Mountains of data tell us that, in aggregate, we're spending
time in apps that we once spent surfing the Web. We're in love with
apps, and they've taken over. On phones, 86% of our time is spent
in apps, and just 14% is spent on the Web, according to
mobile-analytics company Flurry.
This might seem like a trivial change. In the old days, we
printed out directions from the website MapQuest that were often
wrong or confusing. Today we call up Waze on our phones and are
routed around traffic in real time. For those who remember the old
way, this is a miracle.
Everything about apps feels like a win for users--they're faster
and easier to use than what came before. But underneath all that
convenience is something sinister: the end of the very openness
that allowed Internet companies to grow into some of the most
powerful or important companies of the 21st century.
Take that most essential of activities for e-commerce: accepting
credit cards. When Amazon.com made its debut on the Web, it had to
pay a few percentage points in transaction fees. But Apple takes
30% of every transaction conducted within an app sold through its
app store, and "very few businesses in the world can withstand that
haircut," says Chris Dixon, a venture capitalist at Andreessen
Horowitz.
App stores, which are shackled to particular operating systems
and devices, are walled gardens where Apple, Google, Microsoft and
Amazon get to set the rules. For a while, that meant Apple banned
Bitcoin, an alternative currency that many technologists believe is
the most revolutionary development on the Internet since the
hyperlink. Apple regularly bans apps that offend its politics,
taste, or compete with its own software and services.
But the problem with apps runs much deeper than the ways they
can be controlled by centralized gatekeepers. The Web was invented
by academics whose goal was sharing information. Tim Berners-Lee
was just trying to make it easy for scientists to publish data they
were putting together during construction of CERN, the world's
biggest particle accelerator.
No one involved knew they were giving birth to the biggest
creator and destroyer of wealth anyone had ever seen. So, unlike
with app stores, there was no drive to control the early Web.
Standards bodies arose--like the United Nations, but for
programming languages. Companies that would have liked to wipe each
other off the map were forced, by the very nature of the Web, to
come together and agree on revisions to the common language for Web
pages.
The result: anyone could put up a Web page or launch a new
service, and anyone could access it. Google was born in a garage.
Facebook was born in Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room.
But app stores don't work like that. The lists of
most-downloaded apps now drive consumer adoption of those apps.
Search on app stores is broken.
The Web is built of links, but apps don't have a functional
equivalent. Facebook and Google are trying to fix this by creating
a standard called "deep linking," but there are fundamental
technical barriers to making apps behave like websites.
The Web was intended to expose information. It was so devoted to
sharing above all else that it didn't include any way to pay for
things--something some of its early architects regret to this day,
since it forced the Web to survive on advertising.
The Web wasn't perfect, but it created a commons where people
could exchange information and goods. It forced companies to build
technology that was explicitly designed to be compatible with
competitors' technology. Microsoft's Web browser had to faithfully
render Apple's website. If it didn't, consumers would use another
one, such as Firefox or Google's Chrome, which has since taken
over.
Today, as apps take over, the Web's architects are abandoning
it. Google's newest experiment in email nirvana, called Inbox, is
available for both Android and Apple's iOS, but on the Web it
doesn't work in any browser except Chrome. The process of creating
new Web standards has slowed to a crawl. Meanwhile, companies with
app stores are devoted to making those stores better than--and
entirely incompatible with--app stores built by competitors.
"In a lot of tech processes, as things decline a little bit, the
way the world reacts is that it tends to accelerate that decline,"
says Mr. Dixon. "If you go to any Internet startup or large
company, they have large teams focused on creating very high
quality native apps, and they tend to de-prioritize the mobile Web
by comparison."
Many industry watchers think this is just fine. Ben Thompson, an
independent tech and mobile analyst, told me he sees the dominance
of apps as the "natural state" for software. Ruefully, I have to
agree. The history of computing is companies trying to use their
market power to shut out rivals, even when it's bad for innovation
and the consumer.
That doesn't mean the Web will disappear. Facebook and Google
still rely on it to furnish a stream of content that can be
accessed from within their apps. But even the Web of documents and
news items could go away. Facebook has announced plans to host
publishers' work within Facebook itself, leaving the Web nothing
but a curiosity, a relic haunted by hobbyists.
I think the Web was a historical accident, an anomalous instance
of a powerful new technology going almost directly from a publicly
funded research lab to the public. It caught existing juggernauts
like Microsoft flat-footed, and it led to the kind of disruption
today's most powerful tech companies would prefer to avoid.
It isn't that today's kings of the app world want to quash
innovation, per se. It is that in the transition to a world in
which services are delivered through apps, rather than the Web, we
are graduating to a system that makes innovation, serendipity and
experimentation that much harder for those who build things that
rely on the Internet. And today, that is pretty much everyone.
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