I think the author makes a lot of good points, but misses a key point. We're not shuffling off into walled gardens because Google and Facebook want to "own" the

I think the author makes a lot of good points, but misses a key point. We're not shuffling off into walled gardens because Google and Facebook want to "own" their users -- they do, of course, but users aren't just being herded like cattle by Facebook. Users are getting into walled gardens because walled gardens offer users a lot of advantages right now. 1) Internet users are becoming less technical as the number of Internet users increases, and they want things to just work. They don't want to know whether their mail server is POP or IMAP, they just want to send and receive e-mail. They don't want to have to try and figure out which IRC server to get on to get a decent ping or to avoid a netsplit, they just want to chat. Zero setup, zero installation, just go to a webapp and all those details are handled for you. 2) Internet users are becoming increasingly mobile, and most of our pre-HTTP Internet protocols scale poorly over mobile. Mobile devices are power and bandwidth constrained in ways that protocols didn't envision. Chat applications not written with mobile in mind are giant battery hogs. 3) The open web is a dumpster fire. SEO makes a lot of Google search results difficult if not impossible to wade through (try searching for information on a particular printer or lawnmower and see how many results you can find about anything other than someone who wants to sell you one). An article with pictures that measures under half a megabyte comes with four megabytes of ads and trackers. If you peek behind the spam filters, something like 90% of the e-mail anyone gets is best described as junk. Some of it's malicious junk at that. Most open forums quickly degenerate into a showcase of the worst humanity has to offer -- go check the comments on a newspaper or TV news website if you don't believe me. 4) Nobody can make any money except through advertising, and even that's becoming problematic. The problem with things like subscriptions is that they reduce the value of the hyperlink towards zero. And you can say, "for just the price of a cup of coffee you can keep this website open," but having to buy 50 to 100 cups of coffee every month to support all the websites you like to visit at some point during a month quickly becomes untenable. And so advertising comes to dominate the web in increasingly perverse ways (which explains about half of point three). Walled gardens are one way to offer a respite from the worst abuses of advertising -- Facebook doesn't need to send you 5mb of JavaScript to track you, they can do a much better job of tracking you with a lot less overhead than third-party trackers can. If you want to fight walled gardens, you need to find ways to solve these problems in ways that don't involve walled gardens or offer ordinary users (users who don't share this community's convictions that open is inherently better) benefits that a walled garden doesn't or can't.