Free from Being Controlled

In his book Weaving the Web, Tim Berners-Lee argued:

Philosophically, if the Web was to be a universal resource, it had to be able to grow in an unlimited way. Technically, if there was any centralized point of control, it would rapidly become a bottleneck that restricted the Web's growth, and the Web would never scale up. Its being "out of control" was very important.

It is a great insight and Web evolution proves it. At the beginning, we had lots of the so-called web portals such as Yahoo, AOL, and MSN. Unless through them the regular users would hardly get to the Web. Very quickly these portals became the bottleneck of Web evolution and thus they were faded. The Web does not need entry points to be entered.

Then we had the second-generation Web portals---social portals such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. In similar, gradually they become the bottleneck of Web evolution for they are dragging a type of general public resources, which is supposed to be free, to their private interest. Therefore, a new type of barriers has been constructed to block the expansion of the Web. To the end, the social Web does not need entry points to be entered either.

There is always a difference between what need to be controlled and what must be free by the nature. The reason of the fallen of the Web portal business model was not that the portals were evil or nobody wanted to get to it (actually until today Yahoo.com is still one of the most popular Web sites according to the number of visitors daily). It was due to that the portals wanted to hold a type of free public resources, i.e. the right of free accessing to the public knowledge, and took benefit from it indefinitely. Such a greedy intention is conflict to the evolution of World Wide Web.

The social portals will fall by the same reason. The right of free accessing to the friends and their thoughts is by nature a type of free public resources that must not be controlled. No one can take benefit from such a type of control indefinitely. It is, again, conflict to the evolution of World Wide Web.