a web of enclosures

The perceived insensitivity of Search Plus Your World. A rousing response from Twitter. Recently accused in a gotcha moment captured by the Wall Street Journal of flouting privacy policies and infiltrating iPhones everywhere. It hasn’t been a good start of the year for Google.

But what’s remarkable about these moments has less to do with Google and more to do with the fundamental shift underway on the internet - call it the internet enclosure movement.

Google essentially sprang up as a response to the unruly and overwhelming open web. PageRank made sense of the network of links connecting sites in a way that evinced the reputation of a web page, rather than a site’s facility with keywords. Throughout much of its existence, sites, blogs, businesses have competed to be noticed by Google and invested millions of dollars in optimizing their properties for Google’s search-engine.

The trouble is, users are shifting away from an open to an enclosed web. Twitter, Facebook. These aren’t indexed by Google. They’re not on the open web. They’re enclosed - like little walled gardens.

Twitter provides a browser for short-form, real-time broadcast across millions of users on a proprietary network. Facebook has built a prolific people-browser to organize and track everything from photos to relationships to experiences across a vast social-graph. Neither the updates of Twitter nor Facebook’s people and their graph are open to the Google crawlers.

Facebook and Twitter offer enclosed alternatives to the open web. They have largely shut out Google, its crawlers, and its advertising machine, and they have little incentive to open up. Like AOL in the 90’s, they’d rather cultivate a proprietary and controlled experience through which they can drive commerce and advertising. The question today, then, is what do we lose when we move from an open web to a web of enclosures?