This is something that’s worth thinking about as we see the social web becoming a mainstream phenomenon, with all that implies. The choices we make when it comes to the platforms we use, and the choices those platforms make about how they choose to monetize their networks, will have far-reaching implications.

The story of how Berners-Lee created the web is pretty well-known: how we was working as a researcher at the CERN Institute in Switzerland and decided to try to put the theories of earlier thinkers such as Ted Nelson and Vannevar Bush into practice and developed a series of programs and standards that would allow a scientist in one lab to connect his thoughts or research to information that was located on a computer somewhere else. The result was hypertext markup language, or HTML, as well as the hypertext transport protocol, or HTTP — concepts that most of us barely even think about anymore, as they have become such an integral part of our lives.

A critical feature: No centralized control

It’s interesting to note that the initial response to Berners-Lee’s idea was skepticism, primarily because others in the field wanted all hyperlinks to be approved by a central authority, so that no one would click on a link and find nothing (or something unexpected) at the other end. As a Time magazine feature on Berners-Lee from 2001 described it:

“When Berners-Lee attended hypertext exhibits and asked designers whether they could make their systems worldwide, they often said no, citing this need for a clearinghouse. Finally [he said], ‘I realized that this dangling-link thing may be a problem, but you have to accept it.’”

That willingness to give up some form of centralized control may not seem like a big deal, but I think it was a crucial aspect of what Berners-Lee and CERN did in throwing the development of the web open to anyone, provided they abided by certain minimal standards. And it’s directly related to his other decision, which was not to try to commercialize what he had invented — something he left to people like Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, who turned the graphical browser he developed at the University of Illinois into a corporation and launched the initial wave of commercial web companies in the mid-1990s.

As Robert Wright (who did the interview with Berners-Lee for Time magazine in 2001) notes in a recent post at The Atlantic about the anniversary of the web, it would have been fairly easy for Berners-Lee to build on what he had developed and create some kind of commercial entity. In fact, he had a graphical browser/editor before Mosaic or Netscape came along (and the two-way or social web was very much part of Berners-Lee’s initial vision). But he didn’t, and one of the main reasons was that he didn’t want the web to become balkanized, with multiple versions of the browser that wouldn’t be truly interoperable with each other or the open web. As Wright described it in 2001:

“Berners-Lee envisioned competitors springing up, creating incompatible browsers and balkanizing the Web. He thought it better to stay above the fray and try to bring technical harmony.”

What kind of web do we really want?

Reading about Berners-Lee and thinking about the development of the web — and all the ways in which it could have become something very different — made me think about the recent furor over the evolution of Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook, and how the nature of those networks is changing as commercial pressures come to the forefront. Twitter in particular is no longer just an open platform for real-time information, with an API that anyone can use to add value to the network. Now it is a commercial media entity with corporate partnerships and advertising relationships that will determine much of its future behavior.

As Hunter Walk of YouTube has pointed out, a big part of the impetus for this change is the massive amount of venture financing Twitter has taken on over the years and its attempts to justify an implied market value of $8 billion or so. Facebook is in a similar situation, since it has gotten billions in venture funding and is now a public company with shareholders and investment bankers to satisfy. Thanks to Berners-Lee, the web has never been a commercial entity, or it probably would have turned into something like AOL or CompuServe.

Even potential competitors to Twitter like App.net, which entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell is trying to develop, are driven by their funding models: Caldwell argues his service would be better because users and developers would pay for it, but others — including blogger-turned-venture-capitalist MG Siegler — maintain that in order to become successful App.net would eventually have to do many of the same things Twitter is doing and that the only real alternative would be a truly open platform (something blogging pioneer and developer Dave Winer has been talking about for some time).

Berners-Lee has also raised a warning flag before about “walled gardens,” such as the Apple ecosystem and Facebook, which he says threaten the open nature of the web. In the end, the debate about what Twitter and others are doing is about more than just competitive concerns or even capitalism vs. nonprofit models. It’s about what kind of internet we want and what we are prepared to do in order to get it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Fabio Venni and Faramarz Hashemi

Every so often, a controversy erupts over something that seems relatively simple: Namely, the concept of linking to (and thereby giving credit to) the source of a news report. In one of the most recent examples, Instapaper founder Marco Arment — who broke the news about a wave of corrupted apps in the Apple store — kept track of both media outlets that repeated the news and whether they gave credit to him or not. Some did but others didn’t, and some hid their links or otherwise tried to make it look like they broke the news themselves. There are a number of reasons why this kind of behavior is still so common a decade after digital media became mainstream, but none of them justify it. Simply put, linking is a core value of the web, and if we lose that then we have lost something incredibly important.

Arment initially reported on Wednesday that corrupted apps downloaded from the Apple store were crashing repeatedly, something he noticed with his own Instapaper app first and then confirmed was a problem for close to 100 other apps. The news spread quickly throughout the tech blogosphere, but Arment noticed that many outlets were not giving him credit for breaking the news, so he started what he called “Rewrite Bingo” by cataloging the blogs that were duplicating his report.

Time for rewrite bingo! CNET's rewrite, not too bad: news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-5… The Verge's post, better: theverge.com/2012/7/4/31380…

—
Marco Arment (@marcoarment) July 05, 2012

In some cases, blogs such as CNET gave credit to Arment for the initial report and linked to him prominently, while others linked to one of the first outlets that repeated his news, such as The Verge. Some linked to subsequent reports at other sites without any mention of Arment. And several reports that didn’t initially give credit to him were updated to add a link after the Instapaper founder started tweeting about the lack of credit. Both John Gruber of the Apple blog Daring Fireball and Alex Howard of O’Reilly Radar pulled together Storify collections of his Twitter stream.

Virtually every blog or media outlet has probably seen similar kinds of behavior, and that includes GigaOM: Our legal expert Jeff Roberts broke a story on Thursday about a patent troll going after the popular travel site Hipmunk, and several outlets covered the same news without providing a link to our post on it. With other stories, including one recent one from Ki Mae Heussner about an Amazon acquisition, outlets such as the Wall Street Journal mentioned her report but failed to link. Although a link was added later after we complained, it shouldn’t take a complaint to get a media outlet to give credit to the original source of the news it is reporting.

Linking is a critical part of web culture

As I argued after a similar incident last year, this kind of linking isn’t just polite: It is also a crucial part of what makes the web function. Whether or not you believe in the value of the so-called “link economy,” giving credit to the sources of the information you used to develop a post or story is a principle that distinguishes ethical outlets from unethical ones. And as David Weinberger of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society has pointed out in the past, the ability to link to sources is also a critical element of transparency and something that separates online media from print. As Om has said:

Links were and are the currency of the collaborative web, that started with blogs and since then has spread to everything from Twitter to Facebook to Tumblr. Links are the essence of the new remix culture. It is how you show that you respect someone’s work and efforts. It is also indicative that you are part of a community.

In the days when newspapers ruled the world of information, giving credit to other outlets was (and often still is) discouraged. Rewriting or “matching” a story that someone else broke — or taking wire-service reports and rewriting them a little — was standard practice, and code words such as “one report” were often used so a newspaper wouldn’t have to mention a competitor’s news story. This kind of behavior has spilled over onto the web as more mainstream media outlets have moved online.

One reason people often give for the failure to link (or the “hiding” of links at the bottom of an article, for which some have criticized outlets like The Verge) is that the financial model for digital media — that is, advertising — relies on page views, and one of the ways to juice those numbers is to pretend you broke a story. But regardless of whether this inflates reader numbers in the short term, it ultimately depreciates the value of the blog that does it, and that leads to a loss of trust. And trust is far more important than pretending you have a scoop, the half-life of which is now measured in minutes.

But this isn’t just about the media. Despite skeptics like Nicholas Carr, who has argued links interrupt the flow of reading and confuse readers, linking of all kinds is one of the crucial underpinnings of the internet and the web. That’s why the attempt to criminalize links via lawsuits like the one the U.S. government has launched against website operator Richard O’Dwyer (who linked to copyright-infringing video streams), is such a dangerous phenomenon. Links are the lifeblood of the internet, and it is up to all of us to see that we keep them — and the collaborative nature of the web itself — alive.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Skedonk and Robert Brook

According to a report this week from Open Rights Group and the London School of Economics, many local mobile operators are using aggressive — but haphazard — child protection filters by default, leaving adult customers unable to see perfectly ordinary websites instead of preventing kids from accessing adult material.

As the report says (PDF):

“There are serious consequences to badly implemented, default child protection blocking systems. They include restrictions on markets, censorship, a failure to address young people’s diverse needs and a false sense of security for parents.”

The document outlines more than 60 reported cases where websites have been erroneously flagged as containing adult content — and these are just the small number of cases reported to the Open Rights Group’s blocked.org.uk complaint service.

This really isn’t just an oddity. I regularly run into blocks when browsing news or data online on my phone, which is on a business tariff with Vodafone — surely a product most kids wouldn’t be using.

And in fact, just yesterday we received a message saying that the adult filter for France Telecom-owned Orange was blocking GigaOM.

Now, I know we’re a site for grown-ups, but that’s just silly.

If your operator is deciding on your behalf that what we write is off limits — including now, of course, the fact that we’re telling you that these blocks are faulty — then there’s really no reason to suspect it couldn’t happen to anybody, at any time.

Spreading censorship

And it’s not just in Britain, either. This sort of approach is happening all over Europe, in a variety of ways.

In a piece for Foreign Policy, the author and activist Rebecca Mackinnon outlines some of the incursions being made — and points out that, crucially, none of this is happening because of regulatory pressure.

“This type of problem is serious enough, in enough countries, to have made its way to the U.N. Human Rights Council. Last year, the U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of expression, Frank La Rue, delivered an official report to the council that not only condemned the censorship and surveillance practices of authoritarian countries, but also warned of dangerous trends in the democratic world that threaten citizen rights to free expression in the Internet age.

“One of his major concerns is ‘over-broad private censorship, often without transparency and the due process of the law’. He singled out two examples of how governments are, ironically, using law to delegate enforcement responsibilities and functions to the private sector: Britain’s Digital Economy Act, which could potentially disconnect Internet users suspected of illegal downloading, and France’s similar ‘three strikes’ law.

The result of all this?

In the name of protecting us, mobile operators are now becoming the de facto censors of the web, whether we’ve asked them to or not.

Photograph copyright Shutterstock/Pixel 4 images

Now French upstart unlimited-music service Deezer has shown Spotify how to do it properly, by winning a small media partnership for its better web embed player.

Deezer is servicing reviews write-ups on the little-known indie music website Artrocker with a playlist widget comprising reviewed tracks (example). That’s the same kind of partnership Spotify struck with top-tier partners like Rolling Stone and Time Out.

But, through Deezer, Artrocker’s readers can play the tunes right there on the web page, without opening a supporting application. Of course, Deezer is entirely web-based.

Deezer wants to use the exposure to sign new users. Embedded track plays are limited to 30 seconds until Artrocker readers subscribe to Deezer itself. But they get a 15-day free trial when they play the widget for the first time.

Deezer has offered embeds for three years, and leveraged them in its native France through festival partners like Les Inrocks, Télérama, Arte Live Web, Rock en Seine and in the UK and Ireland with Jazz FM, Clash and The Irish Times. It won’t disclose how much consumption occurs this way.

Deezer has also put a “radio”-like web player atop all Artrocker pages which, sadly, stops playing each time a user flips pages.

Conclusion: Deezer, like Rdio, has a neater web deployment than Spotify, which is not a web service. If it all works, the web could help Deezer build its business, which it is rapidly building out in countries around the world.

But none of that will matter a jot. Such is Spotify’s heft and influence in the world of music subscription now, it is becoming the segment’s default service regardless.