You are on page 1of 19

17/8/2010 The Web Is Dead.

Long Live the Inter…

COVER

The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet

FEATURE

The Web Is Dead? A Debate

PLAY

Scott Brown on How Max Headroom Predicted the Demise of TV Journalism

18.09

The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet


By Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff August 17, 2010 | 9:00 am | Wired September 2010

Sources: Cisco estimates based on CAIDA publications, Andrew Odlyzko


An earlier version of this graphic incorrectly listed the chart's timespan from 1995 to 2005. The
correct timespan is from 1990 to 2010. The correct version appears in the print magazine.

The Web Is Dead? A Debate


wired.com/magazine/2010/08/…/1 1/19
17/8/2010 The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Inter…
How the Web Wins
How Do Native Apps and Web Apps Compare?

Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline,
as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the
searching and more about the getting. Chris Anderson explains
how this new paradigm reflects the inevitable course of
capitalism. And Michael Wolff explains why the new breed of
media titan is forsaking the Web for more promising (and
profitable) pastures.

Who’s to Blame: Who’s to Blame:


Us Them
As much as we love the open, unfettered Web, we’re Chaos isn’t a business model. A new breed
abandoning it for simpler, sleeker services that just work. of media moguls is bringing order — and
by Chris Anderson profits — to the digital world.
by Michael Wolff
You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad
— that’s one app. During breakfast you browse An amusing development in the past
Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three year or so — if you regard post-Soviet
more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a finance as amusing — is that Russian
podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you investor Yuri Milner has, bit by bit,
scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and amassed one of the most valuable stakes
IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you on the Internet: He’s got 10 percent of
come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play Facebook. He’s done this by undercutting
some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s traditional American VCs — the Kleiners
streaming service. and the Sequoias who would, in days past,
insist on a special status in return for their
You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the early investment. Milner not only offers
Web. And you are not alone. better terms than VC firms, he sees the
world differently. The traditional VC has a
This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one portfolio of Web sites, expecting a few of
of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the them to be successes — a good metaphor
move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms for the Web itself, broad not deep,
that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for dependent on the connections between
display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone sites rather than any one, autonomous
model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t property. In an entirely different strategic
crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world model, the Russian is concentrating his bet
that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because on a unique power bloc. Not only is
they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these Facebook more than just another Web
dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into site, Milner says, but with 500 million users
wired.com/magazine/2010/08/…/1 2/19
17/8/2010 The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Inter…
site, Milner says, but with 500 million users
their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go it’s “the largest Web site there has ever
to the screen). The fact that it’s easier for companies to been, so large that it is not a Web site at
make money on these platforms only cements the trend. all.”
Producers and consumers agree: The Web is not the
culmination of the digital revolution.—A decade ago, the According to Compete, a Web analytics
ascent of the Web browser as the center of the computing company, the top 10 Web sites accounted
world appeared inevitable. It seemed just a matter of time for 31 percent of US pageviews in 2001,
before the Web replaced PC application software and 40 percent in 2006, and about 75 percent
reduced operating systems to a “poorly debugged set of in 2010. “Big sucks the traffic out of
device drivers,” as Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen small,” Milner says. “In theory you can
famously said. First Java, then Flash, then Ajax, then have a few very successful individuals
HTML5 — increasingly interactive online code — controlling hundreds of millions of people.
promised to put all apps in the cloud and replace the You can become big fast, and that favors
desktop with the webtop. Open, free, and out of control. the domination of strong people.”

But there has always been an alternative path, one that saw Milner sounds more like a traditional
the Web as a worthy tool but not the whole toolkit. In media mogul than a Web entrepreneur.
1997, Wired published a now-infamous “Push!” cover But that’s exactly the point. If we’re
story, which suggested that it was time to “kiss your moving away from the open Web, it’s at
browser goodbye.” The argument then was that “push” least in part because of the rising
technologies such as PointCast and Microsoft’s Active dominance of businesspeople more
Desktop would create a “radical future of media beyond inclined to think in the all-or-nothing terms
the Web.” of traditional media than in the come-one-
come-all collectivist utopianism of the
“Sure, we’ll always have Web pages. We still have Web. This is not just natural maturation but
postcards and telegrams, don’t we? But the center of in many ways the result of a competing
interactive media — increasingly, the center of gravity of all idea — one that rejects the Web’s ethic,
media — is moving to a post-HTML environment,” we technology, and business models. The
promised nearly a decade and half ago. The examples of control the Web took from the vertically
the time were a bit silly — a “3-D furry-muckers VR integrated, top-down media world can,
space” and “headlines sent to a pager” — but the point with a little rethinking of the nature and the
was altogether prescient: a glimpse of the machine-to- use of the Internet, be taken back.
machine future that would be less about browsing and
more about getting. This development — a familiar historical
march, both feudal and corporate, in which
the less powerful are sapped of their
reason for being by the better resourced,
organized, and efficient — is perhaps the
rudest shock possible to the leveled,
porous, low-barrier-to-entry ethos of the
Internet Age. After all, this is a battle that
seemed fought and won — not just
toppling newspapers and music labels but
also AOL and Prodigy and anyone who
built a business on the idea that a curated
experience would beat out the flexibility
and freedom of the Web.

wired.com/magazine/2010/08/…/1 3/19
17/8/2010 The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Inter…

Illustration: Dirk Fowler

As it happened, PointCast, a The truth is that the Web has always had two faces. On the one
glorified screensaver that could hand, the Internet has meant the breakdown of incumbent
inadvertently bring your corporate businesses and traditional power structures. On the other, it’s
network to its knees, quickly been a constant power struggle, with many companies banking
imploded, taking push with it. But their strategy on controlling all or large chunks of the TCP/IP-
just as Web 2.0 is simply Web 1.0 fueled universe. Netscape tried to own the homepage;
that works, the idea has come Amazon.com tried to dominate retail; Yahoo, the navigation of
around again. Those push concepts the Web.
have now reappeared as APIs,
apps, and the smartphone. And this Google was the endpoint of this process: It may represent open
time we have Apple and the systems and leveled architecture, but with superb irony and
iPhone/iPad juggernaut leading the strategic brilliance it came to almost completely control that
way, with tens of millions of openness. It’s difficult to imagine another industry so thoroughly
consumers already voting with their subservient to one player. In the Google model, there is one
wallets for an app-led experience. distributor of movies, which also owns all the theaters. Google,
This post-Web future now looks a by managing both traffic and sales (advertising), created a
lot more convincing. Indeed, it’s condition in which it was impossible for anyone else doing
already here. business in the traditional Web to be bigger than or even
competitive with Google. It was the imperial master over the
The Web is, after all, just one of world’s most distributed systems. A kind of Rome.
many applications that exist on the
Internet, which uses the IP and TCP In an analysis that sees the Web, in the description of Interactive
protocols to move packets around. Advertising Bureau president Randall Rothenberg, as driven by
This architecture — not the specific “a bunch of megalomaniacs who want to own the entirety of the
applications built on top of it — is world,” it is perhaps inevitable that some of those megalomaniacs
the revolution. Today the content began to see replicating Google’s achievement as their
you see in your browser — largely fundamental business challenge. And because Google so
HTML data delivered via the http dominated the Web, that meant building an alternative to the
protocol on port 80 — accounts for Web.
less than a quarter of the traffic on
the Internet … and it’s shrinking.
The applications that account for
more of the Internet’s traffic include
peer-to-peer file transfers, email,
company VPNs, the machine-to-
machine communications of APIs,
Skype calls, World of Warcraft
and other online games, Xbox Live,
iTunes, voice-over-IP phones,
iChat, and Netflix movie streaming.
Many of the newer Net applications Enter Facebook. The site began as a free but closed system. It
are closed, often proprietary,
wired.com/magazine/2010/08/…/1 4/19
17/8/2010 The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Inter…
are closed, often proprietary, required not just registration but an acceptable email address
networks. (from a university, or later, from any school). Google was
forbidden to search through its servers. By the time it opened to
And the shift is only accelerating.
the general public in 2006, its clublike, ritualistic, highly regulated
Within five years, Morgan Stanley
foundation was already in place. Its very attraction was that it
projects, the number of users was a closed system. Indeed, Facebook’s organization of
accessing the Net from mobile information and relationships became, in a remarkably short
devices will surpass the number who period of time, a redoubt from the Web — a simpler, more habit-
access it from PCs. Because the forming place. The company invited developers to create games
screens are smaller, such mobile
and applications specifically for use on Facebook, turning the site
traffic tends to be driven by
into a full-fledged platform. And then, at some critical-mass point,
specialty software, mostly apps, not just in terms of registration numbers but of sheer time spent,
designed for a single purpose. For of habituation and loyalty, Facebook became a parallel world to
the sake of the optimized experience the Web, an experience that was vastly different and arguably
on mobile devices, users forgo the more fulfilling and compelling and that consumed the time
general-purpose browser. They use
previously spent idly drifting from site to site. Even more to the
the Net, but not the Web. Fast point, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg possessed a clear
beats flexible. vision of empire: one in which the developers who built
applications on top of the platform that his company owned and
This was all inevitable. It is the
controlled would always be subservient to the platform itself. It
cycle of capitalism. The story of
industrial revolutions, after all, is a was, all of a sudden, not just a radical displacement but also an
story of battles over control. A extraordinary concentration of power. The Web of countless
technology is invented, it spreads, a entrepreneurs was being overshadowed by the single
thousand flowers bloom, and then entrepreneur-mogul-visionary model, a ruthless paragon of
someone finds a way to own it, everything the Web was not: rigid standards, high design,
centralized control.
locking out others. It happens every
time.
Striving megalomaniacs like Zuckerberg weren’t the only ones
eager to topple Google’s model of the open Web. Content
Take railroads. Uniform and open
companies, which depend on advertising to fund the creation and
gauge standards helped the industry
boom and created an explosion of promulgation of their wares, appeared to be losing faith in their
competitors — in 1920, there were ability to do so online. The Web was built by engineers, not
186 major railroads in the US. But editors. So nobody paid much attention to the fact that HTML-
eventually the strongest of them constructed Web sites — the most advanced form of online
media and design — turned out to be a pretty piss-poor
rolled up the others, and today there
are just seven — a regulated advertising medium.
oligopoly. Or telephones. The For quite a while this was masked by the growth of the audience
invention of the switchboard was share, followed by an ever-growing ad-dollar share, until, about
another open standard that allowed
two years ago, things started to slow down. The audience
networks to interconnect. After
continued to grow at a ferocious rate — about 35 percent of all
telephone patents held by AT&T’s our media time is now spent on the Web — but ad dollars
parent company expired in 1894, weren’t keeping pace. Online ads had risen to some 14 percent
more than 6,000 independent phone of consumer advertising spending but had begun to level off. (In
companies sprouted up. But by contrast, TV — which also accounts for 35 percent of our media
1939, AT&T controlled nearly all of
time, gets nearly 40 percent of ad dollars.)
the US’s long-distance lines and
some four-fifths of its telephones. Or
electricity. In the early 1900s, after

wired.com/magazine/2010/08/…/1 5/19
17/8/2010 The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Inter…
the standardization to alternating
current distribution, hundreds of
small electric utilities were
consolidated into huge holding
companies. By the late 1920s, the
16 largest of those commanded
more than 75 percent of the
electricity generated in the US.

Indeed, there has hardly ever been a


fortune created without a monopoly
of some sort, or at least an
oligopoly. This is the natural path of
industrialization: invention,
propagation, adoption, control.

Now it’s the Web’s turn to face the


pressure for profits and the walled
gardens that bring them. Openness
is a wonderful thing in the
nonmonetary economy of peer
production. But eventually our
tolerance for the delirious chaos of
infinite competition finds its limits.
Much as we love freedom and
choice, we also love things that just
work, reliably and seamlessly. And
if we have to pay for what we love,
well, that increasingly seems OK.
Have you looked at your cell phone
or cable bill lately?

As Jonathan L. Zittrain puts it in The


Future of the Internet — And
How to Stop It, “It is a mistake to
think of the Web browser as the
apex of the PC’s evolution.” Today
the Internet hosts countless closed
gardens; in a sense, the Web is an
exception, not the rule.

Monopolies are actually even more likely in What’s more, there was the additionally sobering
highly networked markets like the online world. and confounding fact that an online consumer
The dark side of network effects is that rich continued to be worth significantly less than an offline
nodes get richer. Metcalfe’s law, which states one. For a while, this was seen as inevitable right-
wired.com/magazine/2010/08/…/1 6/19
17/8/2010 The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Inter…
that the value of a network increases in sizing: Because everything online could be tracked,
proportion to the square of connections, creates advertisers no longer had to pay to reach readers
winner-take-all markets, where the gap between who never saw their ads. You paid for what you got.
the number one and number two players is
typically large and growing. Unfortunately, what you got wasn’t much.
Consumers weren’t motivated by display ads, as
evidenced by the share of the online audience that
bothered to click on them. (According to a 2009
comScore study, only 16 percent of users ever click
on an ad, and 8 percent of users accounted for 85
percent of all clicks.) The Web might generate some
clicks here and there, but you had to aggregate
millions and millions of them to make any money
(which is what Google, and basically nobody else,
was able to do). And the Web almost perversely
So what took so long? Why wasn’t the Web discouraged the kind of systematized, coordinated,
colonized by monopolists a decade ago? focused attention upon which brands are built — the
Because it was in its adolescence then, still prime, or at least most lucrative, function of media.
innovating quickly with a fresh and growing
population of users always looking for something What’s more, this medium rendered powerless the
marketers and agencies that might have been able to
new. Network-driven domination was short-
turn this chaotic mess into an effective selling tool —
lived. Friendster got huge while social networking
was in its infancy, and fickle consumers were still the same marketers and professional salespeople
keen to experiment with the next new thing. They who created the formats (the variety shows, the 30-
found another shiny service and moved on, just second spots, the soap operas) that worked so well
as they had abandoned SixDegrees.com before in television and radio. Advertising powerhouse
WPP, for instance, with its colossal network of
it. In the expanding universe of the early Web,
marketing firms — the same firms that had shaped
AOL’s walled garden couldn’t compete with
what was outside the walls, and so the walls fell. traditional media by matching content with ads that
moved the nation — may still represent a large share
But the Web is now 18 years old. It has reached of Google’s revenue, but it pales next to the greater
adulthood. An entire generation has grown up in population of individual sellers that use Google’s
front of a browser. The exploration of a new AdWords and AdSense programs.
world has turned into business as usual. We get
the Web. It’s part of our life. And we just want
to use the services that make our life better. Our
appetite for discovery slows as our familiarity
with the status quo grows.

Blame human nature. As much as we


intellectually appreciate openness, at the end of
the day we favor the easiest path. We’ll pay for
convenience and reliability, which is why iTunes
can sell songs for 99 cents despite the fact that
they are out there, somewhere, in some form, for
free. When you are young, you have more time
than money, and LimeWire is worth the hassle.
As you get older, you have more money than
time. The iTunes toll is a small price to pay for
wired.com/magazine/2010/08/…/1 7/19
17/8/2010 The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Inter…
the simplicity of just getting what you want. The
more Facebook becomes part of your life, the
more locked in you become. Artificial scarcity is
the natural goal of the profit-seeking.

There is an analogy to the current Web in the first era of the One result of the relative lack of influence
Internet. In the 1990s, as it became clear that digital of professional salespeople and hucksters
networks were the future, there were two warring camps. — the democratization of marketing, if
One was the traditional telcos, on whose wires these feral you will — is that advertising on the Web
bits of the young Internet were being sent. The telcos argued has not developed in the subtle and crafty
that the messy protocols of TCP/IP — all this unpredictable and controlling ways it did in other
routing and those lost packets requiring resending — were a mediums. The ineffectual banner ad,
cry for help. What consumers wanted were “intelligent” created (indeed by the founders of this
networks that could (for a price) find the right path and magazine) in 1994 — and never much
provision the right bandwidth so that transmissions would liked by anyone in the marketing world
flow uninterrupted. Only the owners of the networks could — still remains the foundation of display
put the intelligence in place at the right spots, and thus the advertising on the Web.
Internet would become a value-added service provided by
the AT&Ts of the world, much like ISDN before it. The And then there’s the audience.
rallying cry was “quality of service” (QoS). Only telcos
could offer it, and as soon as consumers demanded it, the At some never-quite-admitted level, the
telcos would win. Web audience, however measurable, is
nevertheless a fraud. Nearly 60 percent
The opposing camp argued for “dumb” networks. Rather of people find Web sites from search
than cede control to the telcos to manage the path that bits engines, much of which may be driven by
took, argued its proponents, just treat the networks as dumb SEO, or “search engine optimization” —
pipes and let TCP/IP figure out the routing. So what if you a new-economy acronym that refers to
have to resend a few times, or the latency is all over the gaming Google’s algorithm to land top
place. Just keep building more capacity — “overprovision results for hot search terms. In other
bandwidth” — and it will be Good Enough. words, many of these people have been
essentially corralled into clicking a
On the underlying Internet itself, Good Enough has won. We random link and may have no idea why
stare at the spinning buffering disks on our YouTube videos they are visiting a particular site — or,
rather than accept the Faustian bargain of some indeed, what site they are visiting. They
Comcast/Google QoS bandwidth deal that we would are the exact opposite of a loyal
invariably end up paying more for. Aside from some audience, the kind that you might expect,
corporate networks, dumb pipes are what the world wants over time, to inculcate with your
from telcos. The innovation advantages of an open message.
marketplace outweigh the limited performance advantages of
a closed system. Web audiences have grown ever larger
even as the quality of those audiences has
But the Web is a different matter. The marketplace has shriveled, leading advertisers to pay less
spoken: When it comes to the applications that run on top of and less to reach them. That, in turn, has
the Net, people are starting to choose quality of service. We meant the rise of junk-shop content
want TweetDeck to organize our Twitter feeds because it’s providers — like Demand Media —
wired.com/magazine/2010/08/…/1 8/19
17/8/2010 The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Inter…
more convenient than the Twitter Web page. The Google which have determined that the only way
Maps mobile app on our phone works better in the car than to make money online is to spend even
the Google Maps Web site on our laptop. And we’d rather less on content than advertisers are
lean back to read books with our Kindle or iPad app than willing to pay to advertise against it. This
lean forward to peer at our desktop browser. further cheapens online content, makes
visitors even less valuable, and continues
At the application layer, the open Internet has always been a to diminish the credibility of the medium.
fiction. It was only because we confused the Web with the
Net that we didn’t see it. The rise of machine-to-machine Even in the face of this downward spiral,
communications — iPhone apps talking to Twitter APIs — the despairing have hoped. But then
is all about control. Every API comes with terms of service, came the recession, and the panic button
and Twitter, Amazon.com, Google, or any other company got pushed. Finally, after years of
can control the use as they will. We are choosing a new form experimentation, content companies
of QoS: custom applications that just work, thanks to came to a disturbing conclusion: The
cached content and local code. Every time you pick an Web did not work. It would never bring
iPhone app instead of a Web site, you are voting with your in the bucks. And so they began looking
finger: A better experience is worth paying for, either in cash for a new model, one that leveraged the
or in implicit acceptance of a non-Web standard. power of the Internet without the value-
destroying side effects of the Web. And
they found Steve Jobs, who — rumor
had it — was working on a new tablet
device.

Now, on the technology side, what the


Web has lacked in its determination to
turn itself into a full-fledged media format
is anybody who knew anything about
media. Likewise, on the media side, there
wasn’t anybody who knew anything
about technology. This has been a
fundamental and aching disconnect:
There was no sublime integration of
content and systems, of experience and
functionality — no clever, subtle,
Machiavellian overarching design able to
create that codependent relationship
between audience, producer, and
marketer.

In the media world, this has taken the form of a shift Jobs perfectly fills that void. Other technologists
from ad-supported free content to freemium — free have steered clear of actual media businesses,
samples as marketing for paid services — with an seeing themselves as renters of systems and third-
emphasis on the “premium” part. On the Web, party facilitators, often deeply wary of any
average CPMs (the price of ads per thousand involvement with content. (See, for instance,

wired.com/magazine/2010/08/…/1 9/19
17/8/2010 The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Inter…
impressions) in key content categories such as news Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s insistence that his
are falling, not rising, because user-generated pages company is not in the content business.) Jobs, on
are flooding Facebook and other sites. The the other hand, built two of the most successful
assumption had been that once the market matured, media businesses of the past generation: iTunes, a
big companies would be able to reverse the content distributor, and Pixar, a movie studio.
hollowing-out trend of analog dollars turning into Then, in 2006, with the sale of Pixar to Disney,
digital pennies. Sadly that hasn’t been the case for Jobs becomes the biggest individual shareholder
most on the Web, and by the looks of it there’s no in one of the world’s biggest traditional media
light at the end of that tunnel. Thus the shift to the conglomerates — indeed much of Jobs’ personal
app model on rich media platforms like the iPad, wealth lies in his traditional media holdings.
where limited free content drives subscription
revenue (check out Wired’s cool new iPad app!). In fact, Jobs had, through iTunes, aligned himself
with traditional media in a way that Google has
The Web won’t take the sequestering of its always resisted. In Google’s open and distributed
commercial space easily. The defenders of the model, almost anybody can advertise on nearly
unfettered Web have their hopes set on HTML5 — any site and Google gets a cut — its interests are
the latest version of Web-building code that offers with the mob. Apple, on the other hand, gets a
applike flexibility — as an open way to satisfy the cut any time anybody buys a movie or song — its
desire for quality of service. If a standard Web interests are aligned with the traditional content
browser can act like an app, offering the sort of providers. (This is, of course, a complicated
clean interface and seamless interactivity that iPad alignment, because in each deal, Apple has
users want, perhaps users will resist the trend to the quickly come to dominate the relationship.)
paid, closed, and proprietary. But the business
forces lining up behind closed platforms are big and So it’s not shocking that Jobs’ iPad-enabled
getting bigger. This is seen by many as a battle for vision of media’s future looks more like media’s
the soul of the digital frontier. past. In this scenario, Jobs is a mogul straight out
of the studio system. While Google may have
Zittrain argues that the demise of the all- controlled traffic and sales, Apple controls the
encompassing, wide-open Web is a dangerous content itself. Indeed, it retains absolute approval
thing, a loss of open standards and services that are rights over all third-party applications. Apple
“generative” — that allow people to find new uses controls the look and feel and experience. And,
for them. “The prospect of tethered appliances and what’s more, it controls both the content-delivery
software as service,” he warns, “permits major system (iTunes) and the devices (iPods, iPhones,
regulatory intrusions to be implemented as minor and iPads) through which that content is
technical adjustments to code or requests to service consumed.
providers.”
Since the dawn of the commercial Web,
But what is actually emerging is not quite the bleak technology has eclipsed content. The new
future of the Internet that Zittrain envisioned. It is business model is to try to let the content — the
only the future of the commercial content side of the product, as it were — eclipse the technology.
digital economy. Ecommerce continues to thrive on Jobs and Zuckerberg are trying to do this like
the Web, and no company is going to shut its Web old-media moguls, fine-tuning all aspects of their
site as an information resource. More important, the product, providing a more designed, directed,
great virtue of today’s Web is that so much of it is and polished experience. The rising breed of
noncommercial. The wide-open Web of peer exciting Internet services — like Spotify, the hotly
production, the so-called generative Web where anticipated streaming music service; and Netflix,
everyone is free to create what they want, continues which lets users stream movies directly to their
to thrive, driven by the nonmonetary incentives of computer screens, Blu-ray players, or Xbox 360s
expression, attention, reputation, and the like. But — also pull us back from the Web. We are

wired.com/magazine/2010/08/…/1 10/19
17/8/2010 The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Inter…
the notion of the Web as the ultimate marketplace returning to a world that already exists — one in
for digital delivery is now in doubt. which we chase the transformative effects of
music and film instead of our brief (relatively
The Internet is the real revolution, as important as speaking) flirtation with the transformative effects
electricity; what we do with it is still evolving. As it of the Web.
moved from your desktop to your pocket, the
nature of the Net changed. The delirious chaos of After a long trip, we may be coming home.
the open Web was an adolescent phase subsidized
by industrial giants groping their way in a new world. Michael Wolff (michael@burnrate.com) is a
Now they’re doing what industrialists do best — new contributing editor for Wired. He is also a
finding choke points. And by the looks of it, we’re columnist for Vanity Fair and the founder of
loving it. Newser, a news-aggregation site.

Editor in chief Chris Anderson


(canderson@wired.com) wrote about the new
industrial revolution in issue 18.02.

2459 retw eet

Pages: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 | Full Page | Next

Tags: apps, capitalism, html5, internet, open web, Push, Web 2.0, www
Post Comment | Permalink

NEXT

The Web Is Dead? A Debate

Comments (41)
Posted by: samunj | 08/17/10 | 9:43 am |

“Application.”

Posted by: klemczak | 08/17/10 | 9:44 am |

The web cannot be spit among the various parts which then die off individually. The whole idea is evolving
and with technology we get different services. The web has always been about access to information, the
current trends only allow us to deliver it, segregate it, and consume it. But the notion of access is still the
same, this will remain for as long as its ‘information is the main course’.

Posted by: jeffsconsult | 08/17/10 | 10:24 am |

I guess all those web 2.0 applications and facebook and flash games are dead too. Facebook on a small 5×3
wired.com/magazine/2010/08/…/1 11/19
17/8/2010 The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Inter…
screen is fine but most still want the web 2.0 experience. Still a lot of tech coming from the browser model.

Posted by: gx5000 | 08/17/10 | 10:28 am |

Dude…get the order right…


MilNet, Internet, Evil Web, Apple Crap…

Besides, your overview stinks of corporate profit think tanks.

Posted by: knightmt | 08/17/10 | 10:37 am |

+1 to gx5000.

Posted by: kgsbca | 08/17/10 | 10:38 am |

1) That’s a five year old graph. Using the ipad to illustrate that dedicated apps are displacing the browser
makes no sense, as it didn’t exist five years ago, and even today, it is probably responsible for less than 1%
of internet traffic.

2) A facebook or twitter app is still connecting to a web server somewhere. It’s still using the web.

3) Using bits transferred as a measure of how the internet is being used is not accurate, as “apps” like video
(which are accessed through web browsers) consume far more badnwidth than html, yet for each video
watched, it is possible that 100 web pages are accessed. Last time I checked, Youtube is a website that uses
static web servers (web 1.0 technology) to present all those videos that consume all that bandwidth.

This article is just another example of Chris Anderson desperately trying to be like Malcolm Gladwell – a guy
who gets media attention by abusing statistics to make inferences that just aren’t true. I’m guessing if he
wasn’t the editor, articles like this would never get published.

Posted by: kme | 08/17/10 | 10:41 am |

oh come on… just because at this present time no one uses gopher, telnet and geocities? The only thing that
has changed in the last 15 years is the quality of the technology, information, entertainment and services. And
I am sorry, but what else where people doing on the web in 2000 that wasn’t entertainment, social,
convenient shopping and information/media sharing?

Email now facilitates much of what newsgroups and FTP had to offer. Also, it is quite easy to share
programs, document files and media over HTTP. Email is probably accessed most over mobile devices rather
than the traditional web. This is hardly a decline in its use.

I don’t miss much of the 1995-2004 web. 2000 was the year ridiculous and ludicrous services jumped their
proverbial sharks. But not every start up was a bad idea destined to certain doom. Much of which was being
innovated during the boom has been synthesized and reinvented by today’s internet giants. IUMA, Geocities,
dorm-room created web sites on college domains… all those forms have been re-imagined. I do miss some
of the really cool stuff of those early razorfish web sites, bullseye… Pandora is so much cooler than Napster.

“The Web is, after all, just one of many applications that exist on the Internet, which uses the IP and TCP
protocols to move packets around.”
wired.com/magazine/2010/08/…/1 12/19
17/8/2010 The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Inter…

I cannot disagree with this more. This abstraction makes no sense. One of many? If anything, the Web is the
sum of content, information and experiences people share over the Internet. The Web is culture, art, human
experience, information and service. It has evolved and matured and reinvented itself many times over. It is
alive and well. Frankly, I would think Wired would know that better than anyone.

Posted by: siege911 | 08/17/10 | 11:01 am |

Sorry but I just had to look at that graph to realize this article was a bit off.

This is obviously a measure of bandwidth. If you spend 5 minutes watching a video on Youtube, you will use
significantly more bandwidth than spending 5 minutes reading Facebook updates or even reading this Wired
article. Additionally, with Peer to Peer downloads, you may not even be at your computer while you are using
bandwidth.

So while the graph looks like the end of the internet, if you measured it in time rather than bandwidth
(obviously a much harder metric to measure), you’d have a more accurate understanding of how the web is
used. That graph is only useful to ISPs who are trying to manage bandwidth.

Posted by: mokalpoa | 08/17/10 | 11:12 am |

Nope. The web is far far away from being dead. And contrary to the post in which it says that Apple and
Google are killing it. In reality, they are building it. This is not about that google-neutrality deception nor,
about how iDevices are striking a problem to the web. But rather, to the subjective opinion of this post.
Much like that much ado we’ve heard from ‘prince’ a couple of months ago.

Posted by: johnnyrock70 | 08/17/10 | 11:12 am |

Mr Anderson: I’m a fan of The Long Tail, I actually built a business around that valid concept. I am also a fan
of Free — although the book could have been 1/2 as long as it was, I still took some useful ideas away from
it. So thanks for that, too.

This “Web is dead” meme, however, is a reach, a conclusion you must have considered yourself if you went
back to a wildly off-the-mark article on Push in order to claim it as “prescient”.

You have done some great work when you think. In this case, I think you have thought too much and back-
filled a premise that you knew would generate some hype. I hope, if this is the next step on a downward
trajectory of your relevance following the success of The Long Tail and somewhat lesser response to Free,
that you go away and come back with something new and redemptive.

Good luck.

Posted by: FriedZombie | 08/17/10 | 11:15 am |

Your future of the internet just flat out sucks Chris, although I do agree that “walled gardens” have appeared
more lately (the most prevalent being Facebook and iTunes) the notion that free content like P2P will
disappear if flat out ludicrous. The fact is that some people fuel their egos by not stuffing their pockets with
bills, but by “jailbreaking” something or releasing some sort of data prematurely as long as there is a demand
for it. As long as those type of people exist they will always need a way to distribute their content.
wired.com/magazine/2010/08/…/1 13/19
17/8/2010 The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Inter…

Posted by: Maximus | 08/17/10 | 11:34 am |

This article is built around a provocative headline based on a misleading chart. You show percentages of the
total volume of data broken down by different types. What you don’t show is 1) the vast increase in the total
amount of data transmitted over the internet over time, or 2) the value that individuals place on different types
of data.

Just because web traffic makes up a smaller percentage of the whole than it used to doesn’t mean that there is
less of it, or that it is less important. In fact, the total amount of web data, like the total number of web sites,
the total amount of web content in different languages, etc., continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

Just because there’s more video data moving over the net now, thanks to bigger and faster pipes, more
streaming services, etc., doesn’t mean the web is in decline.

Posted by: ericlr | 08/17/10 | 11:41 am |

This is about the 1,000th time that Wired has proclaimed the death of the Web since the mid-90’s, and yet
here it still is, alive and kicking.

Posted by: mikeguy3086 | 08/17/10 | 11:41 am |

I got one paragraph in before I started writing this. I think a better headline would read “The web is evolving;
constantly.”

Posted by: JohnGoode | 08/17/10 | 11:50 am |

A week ago I wrote this: http://johngoode.posterous.com/the-interweb-is-changing-at-a-pace and have


subsequently linked to this excellent article.

Posted by: fuzzynormal | 08/17/10 | 11:55 am |

I don’t know. If the series-of-tubes indeed become that app-oriented superhighway (remember that
metaphor) for a majority of folks, then I’ll be rather content cruising around the backroads.

I’m the type that motorbikes on state roads rather then the big-I’s, so maybe it’s just my nature.

Posted by: Sebben | 08/17/10 | 11:58 am |

Let’s do some reality check:

http://www.canalys.com/pr/2010/r2010081.html

iPhone/iPad may be big and cool in US, but they are by far not the dominant platform worldwide. And
Android is growing much faster.

So here’s the deal: it’s a PAIN to maintain an app on an assortiment of hardware and software platforms.
Web appeared to address exactly that. Onse American “app fad” is gone (most likely – by the virtue of
wired.com/magazine/2010/08/…/1 14/19
17/8/2010 The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Inter…
Apple screwing another OS update and adding another device or two to the assortiment), Web will become
fashionable again.

Posted by: m3kw9 | 08/17/10 | 12:04 pm |

Wow, can anyone say attention whoring in the front page?

Posted by: horse | 08/17/10 | 12:07 pm |

“You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad”

Jesus Christ!

Posted by: m3kw9 | 08/17/10 | 12:08 pm |

Dude here is likening the amount of raw data traffic to the actual online content. It’s totally wrong, you can
have a 10k html page with more info than 1 megs of 1080p video. The web is not dead. If it was, we would
not have options to choose what we want to see, this is what the WEB is about. Things linking to each other.

Posted by: pyrosktrrlw0788 | 08/17/10 | 12:08 pm |

Here are some facts about this article:


“Apple” is used 5 times.
“iTunes” is used 6 times.
“iPhone” is used 5 times.
“iPad” is used 8 times.
“iPod” is used 1 time.
.
So what you are trying to say is, if i suck apple’s dong then I’m killing the internet? Sorry but this article is
trash, I agree with just about every comment above mine. Not everyone buys apple toys on launch day and
only facebook sheep play ‘farmville’ and ‘mafia wars’.

Posted by: zeroexcelcior | 08/17/10 | 12:14 pm |

+1 to gx5000.

Posted by: reamon | 08/17/10 | 12:32 pm |

The web is more than HTML.

The browser is not the web.

Push was never “push”–it was poll regularly, which is what overran local networks which in turn caused local
networks to ban it.

Email traditionally wasn’t on the web–SMTP, POP2, IMAP, et al. are other “applications” on the ‘net. But
Gmail, Hotmail and others have made email….a web app.

wired.com/magazine/2010/08/…/1 15/19
17/8/2010 The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Inter…
RSS is a “web feed.”

I listen to Pandora–from a web page.

I manage my Netflix queue–using a web page.

The “day in the life” example probably has web use all over it–it’s just hidden under the covers for the most
part.

Unless one peers into the details of mobile apps, you’ve no idea if it uses the web or not.

Posted by: wired200905271901 | 08/17/10 | 12:32 pm |

That graph is misleading because it claims to be showing proportions, and reads left-to-right with an implicit
vertical evolving measure, but the rhs vertical axis should be approximately ten times as high as the lhs to
show the total quantity of data being transported. New services are rarely replacing older services in absolute
terms – they are adding to them.

Posted by: tylendel | 08/17/10 | 12:36 pm |

aaand i’m done with wired. they are apple’s dancing monkey now, and no better than the other propaganda
outlets. going on bandwidth? please. sounds like fuzzy math to push an agenda to me.

Posted by: reamon | 08/17/10 | 12:39 pm |

RT @ Web: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”

Posted by: rfsully | 08/17/10 | 12:41 pm |

The percentage of total traffic is interesting, but I’d also like to see the absolute volume of traffic by category.
The total bandwidth is growing at a good clip, when you factor that in, the picture will look radically different.

Posted by: RamoneC | 08/17/10 | 12:42 pm |

It looks like the chart Wired used is a little…off, shall we say?

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/08/17/is-the-web-really-de.html

Posted by: Joanna Pearlstein | 08/17/10 | 12:46 pm |

@kgsbca: There was an error in an earlier version of the graphic. The data shows 1990 to 2010, not 1995 to
2005 as indicated earlier. It’s not five-year-old data.

-Joanna Pearlstein
Senior Editor, Research
WIRED Magazine

wired.com/magazine/2010/08/…/1 16/19
17/8/2010 The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Inter…
Posted by: bacon_is_not_geek_related | 08/17/10 | 12:47 pm |

fuck you.

Posted by: Bassman | 08/17/10 | 1:13 pm |

The key issue will be freedom of information. Yes, movies, songs, files and applications increasingly consume
the bulk of the bandwidth. Still, people still use very simple HTML to get their news these days, forgoing
newspapers and “talking heads” shows.

The vital issue will be the freedom with which views counter to the sterile “politically correct” pablum can
continue to be presented. Everyone should fear a “1984″ or “Brave New World” future, where information
reaching the masses is *completely* controlled.

Posted by: samagon | 08/17/10 | 1:15 pm |

what’s interesting is that the different internet protocols died.


.
‘web’ as you have described it, is hypertext transfer protocol. very much alive.
.
The real question is, is the ‘traffic’ a comparison of number of hits, or a percentage of overall bandwidth, or is
it maybe a percentage of how much time someone spends watching movies online vs reading wired?
.
of course ‘web’ bandwidth is going to be lower than ‘video’ bandwidth (which for a large part is still
transferred through a web browser via http).
.
did MUDs back in the day fit into the ‘other’ category? And today do games like WoW fit into the ‘peer to
peer’ category?
.
at the end of the day, a web browser is and always has been one tool to access online content, firefox, IE,
safari, netscape. there have always been tools capable of connecting to content, FTP clients (some web
browsers have been capable of doing this, IE is one), email clients (some web browsers have been capable of
doing this, Netscape is one). There are now other tools that are capable of accessing online content, and they
are much more specialized. A netflix app for my xbox that connects specifically to that content and doesn’t
use some plugin in the browser.
.
‘web’ content is very much alive, I think the real question of this article is:
.
where is the place of the web browser in the next decade?

Posted by: winnipegger | 08/17/10 | 1:20 pm |

I wonder if AT&T Interchange would have built itself with the same model as Facebook and less a cable TV
network could they have done this years ago? They had the newer platform to replace Compuserve but not
the marketting power of AOL but they were trying the same old thing. Ironic that now years later we are
going back to the same types of things that made AOL a success that left Interchange and Compuserve
fighting to get a piece.

wired.com/magazine/2010/08/…/1 17/19
17/8/2010 The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Inter…
Posted by: samagon | 08/17/10 | 1:27 pm |

@myself
.
where I said ‘different protocols died’
.
I should have said ‘different protocols were enveloped and overshadowed.’
.
FTP is as alive today as it was yesterday, just because there isn’t as much percentage of the BW being used
doesn’t mean it isn’t being used.
.
I guess that is what I was saying overall for everything though.

Posted by: Xylenz | 08/17/10 | 1:33 pm |

Actually, we dont have telegrams anymore. The last one got sent a few years ago then Western Union canned
it.

Also, this graph, while interesting shows percentage not quantity. Just because the web portion is decreasing
does not mean that the quantity of web users are diminishing, only the percentage. The graph shows nothing
about the increase in the quantity of people using the internet. 50% of 10,000 is less than 25% of 1,000,000.

Posted by: marvelous | 08/17/10 | 1:39 pm |

Like many other people who posted comments, I want to echo my disappointment with the “death of the
web” premise. I think of it first of all like an add-on, all these new applications such as Pandora and NetFlix.
They’re not displacing technologies, they’re augmenting technologies. They don’t make you use the web any
less, they just enhance the user experience for their particular role, i.e., watching movies or listening to music.
As far as all the Apple fawning, the last time I actually touched an Apple product was sometime around 1994.
Nothing against Apple, I understand they are doing very well. I just haven’t had a need for anything Apple
sells. Keep in mind, folks, 21% of Americans still don’t use the Internet at all (recent Pew study). These vast
generalizations or predictions only go so far. Zero sum graphics like the lead graphic can cloud the total
picture of technology and how we use or don’t use it in our daily lives.

Posted by: careydw | 08/17/10 | 1:42 pm |

The web isn’t dead, I doubt it’ll ever die. What am I reading right now? Where am I typing this comment?
Where do I read my news? What do I use to file my taxes? How do I pay my credit cards? How do I find
real estate?
.
Apps and closed systems are great for small screens and limited bandwidth, but for a large screen and
unlimited* bandwidth you can’t beat the browser, even if the browser is only used to access lots of closed
applications.

Posted by: technophile | 08/17/10 | 1:46 pm |

+1 kgsbca
–>So tired of these idiotic shock journalism, ripleys-believe-it-or-not premises and speculative fiction
wired.com/magazine/2010/08/…/1 18/19
17/8/2010 The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Inter…
masquerading as science. Gladwell comparison spot on.
+1 Xylenz
–>^^^^^^THE MOST prescient point. I can add a couple of hi-def movies to bittorrent and then use my
browser *all day,* and according to your silly metrics, I’m 90% P2P user, and only 10% web user. The
volume of traffic on each protocol has little to no bearing on the what parts of the ‘net are most important or
valuable to me.

This journalistic quality of this article is just so… sad. Well you got me to comment, so, mission
accomplished, I guess. :p

Posted by: DWright | 08/17/10 | 1:48 pm |

I wonder how different that graph would look if, instead of proportion of US internet traffic, it displayed
amount of internet traffic (in terms of bandwidth, time spent, or other metrics)?

I believe we might see that it is less of a case where web traffic is loosing it’s market to other protocols, and
more the case that the market is expanding as other protocol are joining the team.

I’m not sure why it’s such a big deal, anyway. I really don’t remember anybody writing gloom and doom
articles when Gopher was replaced by the Web.

Posted by: technophile | 08/17/10 | 1:52 pm |

“You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app.”
‘we don’t use email anymore, we use APPS!!’ :facepalm:

Where, in your graph, is all this “app” traffic, by the way? I see lots of video, p2p, web, and 3% other.

Posted by: halms | 08/17/10 | 2:00 pm |

you mean no more wired.com? oh well, i always prefer the print anyway.

wired.com/magazine/2010/08/…/1 19/19

You might also like