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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";" lang="ES"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";" lang="ES"><a href="http://www.economist.com/node/16941635">http://www.economist.com/node/16941635</a></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";" lang="ES"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; line-height: 15.75pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><b><span style="font-size: 10.5pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: red;" lang="EN">The future
of the internet</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 20.25pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><b><span style="font-size: 16.5pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">A virtual counter-revolution</span></b></p>
<h2 style="margin-bottom: 3.75pt; line-height: 15.75pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10.5pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">The internet has been a
great unifier of people, companies and online networks. Powerful forces are
threatening to balkanise it </span></h2>
<p class="ec-article-info1" style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 8.5pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";" lang="EN">Sep 2nd 2010 </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 7.5pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN"><img src="file:///C:/Users/ANNE-R%7E1.INN/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image001.jpg" border="0" height="298" width="290"></span><span class="caption1"><span style="font-size: 8.5pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";" lang="EN">A fragmenting virtual world</span></span><span style="font-size: 7.5pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">THE
first internet boom, a decade and a half ago, resembled a religious movement.
Omnipresent cyber-gurus, often framed by colourful PowerPoint presentations reminiscent
of stained glass, prophesied a digital paradise in which not only would
commerce be frictionless and growth exponential, but democracy would be direct
and the nation-state would no longer exist. One, John-Perry Barlow, even penned
“A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">Even
though all this sounded Utopian when it was preached, it reflected online
reality pretty accurately. The internet was a wide-open space, a new frontier.
For the first time, anyone could communicate electronically with anyone
else—globally and essentially free of charge. Anyone was able to create a
website or an online shop, which could be reached from anywhere in the world
using a simple piece of software called a browser, without asking anyone else
for permission. The control of information, opinion and commerce by
governments—or big companies, for that matter—indeed appeared to be a thing of
the past. “You have no sovereignty where we gather,” Mr Barlow wrote.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">The
lofty discourse on “cyberspace” has long changed. Even the term now sounds
passé. Today another overused celestial metaphor holds sway: the “cloud” is
code for all kinds of digital services generated in warehouses packed with
computers, called data centres, and distributed over the internet. Most of the
talk, though, concerns more earthly matters: privacy, antitrust, Google’s woes
in China,
mobile applications, green information technology (IT). Only Apple’s latest
iSomethings seem to inspire religious fervour, as they did again this week.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">Again,
this is a fair reflection of what is happening on the internet. Fifteen years
after its first manifestation as a global, unifying network, it has entered its
second phase: it appears to be balkanising, torn apart by three separate, but
related forces.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">First,
governments are increasingly reasserting their sovereignty. Recently several
countries have demanded that their law-enforcement agencies have access to
e-mails sent from BlackBerry smart-phones. This week India, which had threatened to cut
off BlackBerry service at the end of August, granted RIM, the device’s maker,
an extra two months while authorities consider the firm’s proposal to comply.
However, it has also said that it is going after other communication-service
providers, notably Google and Skype.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">Second, big
IT companies are building their own digital territories, where they set the
rules and control or limit connections to other parts of the internet. Third,
network owners would like to treat different types of traffic differently, in
effect creating faster and slower lanes on the internet.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">It is
still too early to say that the internet has fragmented into “internets”, but
there is a danger that it may splinter along geographical and commercial
boundaries. (The picture above is a visual representation of the “nationality”
of traffic on the internet, created by the University
of California’s Co-operative
Association for Internet Data Analysis: America
is in pink, Britain in dark
blue, Italy in pale blue, Sweden in green
and unknown countries in white.) Just as it was not preordained that the
internet would become one global network where the same rules applied to
everyone, everywhere, it is not certain that it will stay that way, says Kevin
Werbach, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">To grasp
why the internet might unravel, it is necessary to understand how, in the words
of Mr Werbach, “it pulled itself together” in the first place. Even today, this
seems like something of a miracle. In the physical world, most networks—railways,
airlines, telephone systems—are collections of more or less connected islands.
Before the internet and the world wide web came along, this balkanised model
was also the norm online. For a long time, for instance, AOL and CompuServe
would not even exchange e-mails.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">Economists
point to “network effects” to explain why the internet managed to supplant
these proprietary services. Everybody had strong incentives to join: consumers,
companies and, most important, the networks themselves (the internet is in fact
a “network of networks”). The more the internet grew, the greater the benefits
became. And its founding fathers created the basis for this virtuous circle by
making it easy for networks to hook up and for individuals to get wired. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">Yet
economics alone do not explain why the internet rather than a proprietary
service prevailed (as Microsoft did in software for personal computers, or
PCs). One reason may be that the rapid rise of the internet, originally an
obscure academic network funded by America’s Department of Defence,
took everyone by surprise. “The internet was able to develop quietly and
organically for years before it became widely known,” writes Jonathan Zittrain,
a professor at Harvard University, in his 2008 book, “The Future of the
Internet—And How To Stop It”. In other words, had telecoms firms, for instance,
suspected how big it would become, they might have tried earlier to change its
rules.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">Whatever
the cause, the open internet has been a boon for humanity. It has not only
allowed companies and other organisations of all sorts to become more
efficient, but enabled other forms of production, notably “open source”
methods, in which groups of people, often volunteers, all over the world
develop products, mostly pieces of software, collectively. Individuals have
access to more information than ever, communicate more freely and form groups
of like-minded people more easily. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">Even
more important, the internet is an open platform, rather than one built for a
specific service, like the telephone network. Mr Zittrain calls it
“generative”: people can tinker with it, creating new services and elbowing
existing ones aside. Any young company can build a device or develop an
application that connects to the internet, provided it follows certain, mostly
technical conventions. In a more closed and controlled environment, an Amazon,
a Facebook or a Google would probably never have blossomed as it did.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><a name="forces_of_fragmentation"></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN"><br>
<b>Forces of fragmentation</b> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">However,
this very success has given rise to the forces that are now pulling the internet
apart. The cracks are most visible along geographical boundaries. The internet
is too important for governments to ignore. They are increasingly finding ways
to enforce their laws in the digital realm. The most prominent is China’s “great
firewall”. The Chinese authorities are using the same technology that companies
use to stop employees accessing particular websites and online services. This
is why Google at first decided to censor its Chinese search service: there was
no other way to be widely accessible in the country.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 7.5pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN"><img src="file:///C:/Users/ANNE-R%7E1.INN/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image002.gif" border="0" height="353" width="290"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">But China is by no
means the only country erecting borders in cyberspace. The Australian
government plans to build a firewall to block material showing the sexual abuse
of children and other criminal or offensive content. The OpenNet Initiative, an
advocacy group, lists more than a dozen countries that block internet content
for political, social and security reasons. They do not need especially clever
technology: governments go increasingly after dominant online firms because
they are easy to get hold of. In April Google published the numbers of requests
it had received from official agencies to remove content or provide information
about users. Brazil
led both counts (see chart 1).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">Not
every request or barrier has a sinister motive. Australia’s firewall is a case in
point, even if it is a clumsy way of enforcing the law. It would be another
matter, however, if governments started tinkering with the internet’s address
book, the Domain Name System (DNS). This allows the network to look up the
computer on which a website lives. If a country started its own DNS, it could
better control what people can see. Some fear this is precisely what China and
others might do one day. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">To
confuse matters, the DNS is already splintering for a good reason. It was
designed for the Latin alphabet, which was fine when most internet users came
from the West. But because more and more netizens live in other parts of the
world—China
boasts 420m—last October the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers, the body that oversees the DNS, allowed domain names entirely in other
scripts. This makes things easier for people in, say, China, Japan
or Russia,
but marks another step towards the renationalisation of the internet.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">Many
media companies have already gone one step further. They use another part of
the internet’s address system, the “IP numbers” that identify computers on the
network, to block access to content if consumers are not in certain countries.
Try viewing a television show on Hulu, a popular American video service, from
Europe and it will tell you: “We’re sorry, currently our video library can only
be streamed within the United
States.” Similarly, Spotify, a popular
European music-streaming service, cannot be reached from America.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">Yet it
is another kind of commercial attempt to carve up the internet that is causing
more concern. Devotees of a unified cyberspace are worried that the online
world will soon start looking as it did before the internet took over: a
collection of more or less connected proprietary islands reminiscent of AOL and
CompuServe. One of them could even become as dominant as Microsoft in PC
software. “We’re heading into a war for control of the web,” Tim O’Reilly, an
internet savant who heads O’Reilly Media, a publishing house, wrote late last
year. “And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an
interoperable platform.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">The
trend to more closed systems is undeniable. Take Facebook, the web’s biggest
social network. The site is a fast-growing, semi-open platform with more than
500m registered users. Its American contingent spends on average more than six
hours a month on the site and less than two on Google. Users have identities
specific to Facebook and communicate mostly via internal messages. The firm has
its own rules, covering, for instance, which third-party applications may run
and how personal data are dealt with.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">Apple is
even more of a world apart. From its iPhone and iPad, people mostly get access
to online services not through a conventional browser but via specialised
applications available only from the company’s “App Store”. Granted, the store
has lots of apps—about 250,000—but Apple nonetheless controls which ones make
it onto its platform. It has used that power to keep out products it does not
like, including things that can be construed as pornographic or that might
interfere with its business, such as an app for Google’s telephone service.
Apple’s press conference to show off its new wares on September 1st was streamed
live over the internet but could be seen only on its own devices.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">Even
Google can be seen as a platform unto itself, if a very open one. The world’s
biggest search engine now offers dozens of services, from news aggregation to
word processing, all of which are tied together and run on a global network of
dozens of huge data-centres. Yet Google’s most important service is its online
advertising platform, which serves most text-based ads on the web. Being the
company’s main source of revenue, critics say, it is hardly a model of openness
and transparency.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">There is
no conspiracy behind the emergence of these platforms. Firms are in business to
make money. And such phenomena as social networks and online advertising
exhibit strong network effects, meaning that a dominant market leader is likely
to emerge. What is more, most users these days are not experts, but average
consumers, who want secure, reliable products. To create a good experience on
mobile devices, which more and more people will use to get onto the internet,
hardware, software and services must be more tightly integrated than on PCs.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><a name="net_neutrality,_or_not"></a><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN"><br>
<b>Net neutrality, or not?</b> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">Discussion
of these proprietary platforms is only beginning. A lot of ink, however, has
already been spilt on another form of balkanisation: in the plumbing of the
internet. Most of this debate, particularly in America, is about “net neutrality”.
This is one of the internet’s founding principles: that every packet of data,
regardless of its contents, should be treated the same way, and the best effort
should always be made to forward it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">Proponents
of this principle want it to become law, out of concern that network owners
will breach it if they can. Their nightmare is what Tim Wu, a professor at
Columbia University, calls “the Tony Soprano vision of networking”, alluding to
a television series about a mafia family. If operators were allowed to charge
for better service, they could extort protection money from every website.
Those not willing to pay for their data to be transmitted quickly would be left
to crawl in the slow lane. “Allowing broadband carriers to control what people
see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made
the internet such a success,” said Vinton Cerf, one of the network’s founding
fathers (who now works for Google), at a hearing in Congress.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 7.5pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN"><img src="file:///C:/Users/ANNE-R%7E1.INN/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image003.gif" border="0" height="281" width="290"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">Opponents
of the enshrining of net neutrality in law—not just self-interested telecoms
firms, but also experts like Dave Farber, another internet elder—argue that it
would be counterproductive. Outlawing discrimination of any kind could
discourage operators from investing to differentiate their networks. And given
the rapid growth in file-sharing and video (see chart 2), operators may have
good reason to manage data flows, lest other traffic be crowded out. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">The
issue is not as black and white as it seems. The internet has never been as
neutral as some would have it. Network providers do not guarantee a certain
quality of service, but merely promise to do their best. That may not matter for
personal e-mails, but it does for time-sensitive data such as video. What is
more, large internet firms like Amazon and Google have long redirected traffic
onto private fast lanes that bypass the public internet to speed up access to
their websites.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">Whether
such preferential treatment becomes more widespread, and even extortionary,
will probably depend on the market and how it is regulated. It is telling that
net neutrality has become far more politically controversial in America than it
has elsewhere. This is a reflection of the relative lack of competition in America’s
broadband market. In Europe and Japan,
“open access” rules require network operators to lease parts of their networks
to other firms on a wholesale basis, thus boosting competition. A study
comparing broadband markets, published in 2009 by Harvard
University’s Berkman Centre for
Internet & Society, found that countries with such rules enjoy faster,
cheaper broadband service than America,
because the barrier to entry for new entrants is much lower. And if any access
provider starts limiting what customers can do, they will defect to another.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">America</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">’s operators have long insisted that open-access
requirements would destroy their incentive to build fast, new networks: why
bother if you will be forced to share it? After intense lobbying, America’s
telecoms regulators bought this argument. But the lesson from elsewhere in the
industrialised world is that it is not true. The result, however, is that America has a
small number of powerful network operators, prompting concern that they will
abuse their power unless they are compelled, by a net-neutrality law, to treat
all traffic equally. Rather than trying to mandate fairness in this way—net
neutrality is very hard to define or enforce—it makes more sense to address the
underlying problem: the lack of competition.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">It
should come as no surprise that the internet is being pulled apart on every
level. “While technology can gravely wound governments, it rarely kills them,”
Debora Spar, president of Barnard College at Columbia
University, wrote several
years ago in her book, “Ruling the Waves”. “This was all inevitable,” argues
Chris Anderson, the editor of </span><em><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">Wired</span></em><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">, under the headline “The Web is Dead” in the September
issue of the magazine. “A technology is invented, it spreads, a thousand
flowers bloom, and then someone finds a way to own it, locking out others.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">Yet
predictions are hazardous, particularly in IT. Governments may yet realise that
a freer internet is good not just for their economies, but also for their
societies. Consumers may decide that it is unwise to entrust all their secrets
to a single online firm such as Facebook, and decamp to less insular
alternatives, such as Diaspora. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">Similarly,
more open technology could also still prevail in the mobile industry. Android,
Google’s smart-phone platform, which is less closed than Apple’s, is growing
rapidly and gained more subscribers in America than the iPhone in the
first half of this year. Intel and Nokia, the world’s biggest chipmaker and the
biggest manufacturer of telephone handsets, are pushing an even more open
platform called MeeGo. And as mobile devices and networks improve, a
standards-based browser could become the dominant access software on the
wireless internet as well.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 7.5pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN"><img src="file:///C:/Users/ANNE-R%7E1.INN/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image004.jpg" border="0" height="457" width="290"></span><span class="caption1"><span style="font-size: 8.5pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";" lang="EN">Stuck in the slow lane</span></span><span style="font-size: 7.5pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">If,
however, the internet continues to go the other way, this would be bad news.
Should the network become a collection of proprietary islands accessed by
devices controlled remotely by their vendors, the internet would lose much of
its “generativity”, warns Harvard’s Mr Zittrain. Innovation would slow down and
the next Amazon, Google or Facebook could simply be, well, Amazon, Google or
Facebook. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 9.75pt; line-height: 15pt; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" lang="EN">The
danger is not that these islands become physically separated, says Andrew
Odlyzko, a professor at the University
of Minnesota. There is
just too much value in universal connectivity, he argues. “The real question is
how high the walls between these walled gardens will be.” Still, if the
internet loses too much of its universality, cautions Mr Werbach of the Wharton
School, it may indeed fall apart, just as world trade can collapse if there is
too much protectionism. Theory demonstrates that interconnected networks such
as the internet can grow quickly, he explains—but also that they can dissolve
quickly. “This looks rather unlikely today, but if it happens, it will be too
late to do anything about it.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";" lang="EN"> </span></p>
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