The Internet Is Closing.(International Edition; TECHNOLOGY)

We face a wholesale threat to the open Internet environment of the past 30 years.

The Internet, Arguably the most important technological development of the past few decades, happened almost by accident. It started out as a highly experimental project, nurtured far from the mainstream of business and academia. It was spawned with no particular business plan in mind and with no visionary CEO leading the charge. Instead, a group of researchers--nerds, really--got the very un-entrepreneurial idea to develop a set of technical protocols to move data from one place to another and then share them with everybody. The PC, which I think of as a companion technology to the Internet, likewise started as the hobbyhorse of passionate nerds who (at least initially) shared their designs. Both the Internet and the PC were released, so to speak, unfinished, and because they were open technologies, businesses and inventors could use them as a springboard for innovation.

This kind of openness isn't found in cars, fridges, TiVos or any other major technology. It's what helped the Internet and PC succeed over more boring, predictable counterparts--proprietary networks like CompuServe and information appliances like dedicated smart word processors. Now that PCs and the Internet have become mainstream tools, there's rising pressure to turn them into the appliances they've defeated: to close them, in some cases forbidding outside tinkering altogether, and in others allowing them only under closely monitored and controlled circumstances. These days the Internet and the PC as wellsprings of innovation are living on borrowed time.

The new closed models that represent the likely future of consumer computing and networking are no minor tweaks. We face wholesale revision of the Internet and PC environment of the past 30 years. The change is coming partly because of the need to address security problems peculiar to open technologies, and partly because businesses want more control over the experience that customers have with their products. The trend from open systems toward closed ones threatens the culture of serendipitous tinkering that has given us the Web, instant messaging, peer-to-peer networking, Skype, Wikipedia and a host of other innovations, each of which emerged from left field. It will produce a concentrated set of new gatekeepers, with us and them prisoner to their limited business plans and to regulators who fear things that are new and disruptive.

How did the Internet's openness move from virtue to vice? In the pre-Internet days, computing and networking were closed activities. The business world produced expensive networking gear for use in office networks and offering pay-per-minute services, like AOL and CompuServe, for consumers. Firms were prisoner to whatever network vendor provided their hardware and software, and consumers found groomed offerings from whichever walled garden they chose.

The Internet's flexibility soon outpaced both. Physicist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web by publishing protocols by which interested people could describe a "page" of content with links. Anyone could set up a server and offer content, and as the Internet began to accept connections with the public, choosing a network provider no longer meant locking oneself into a bundle of content. The Internet, with no plan for content or profit, ended up generating far more of both than proprietary competitors.

In similar fashion the PC became essential to mainstream businesses and consumers. Within two years of the introduction of the Apple II, which out of its box treated users to a blinking cursor awaiting further programming, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston had invented VisiCalc, the first digital spreadsheet. The PC was no longer merely personal. Word processors and smart ...