Il The Atlantic ha un lungo profilo su Ev Williams, il CEO di Medium (e prima di Twitter, e prima ancora di Blogger). Si parla di open web, e di quello che Williams sta facendo per salvarlo, anche se personalmente non sono del tutto persuaso dal suo discorso (di come e del perché Medium sarebbe diverso — più aperto? — di altri social network):
The open web’s terminal illness is not a story that he alone is telling. It is the common wisdom of the moment, espoused by Times columnists and longtime tech bloggers. The developers who wrote Drupal and WordPress, two important pieces of blogging software, both recently expressed anxiety over the open web’s future. Since so many of these social networks are operated by algorithms, whose machinations are proprietary knowledge, they worry that people are losing any control over what they see when they log on. The once-polyphonic blogosphere, they say, will turn into the web of mass-manufactured schlock.
Something like this has happened before. Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University, argues in his book The Master Switch that every major telecommunications technology has followed the same pattern: a brief, thrilling period of openness, followed by a monopolistic and increasingly atrophied closedness. Without government intervention, the same fate will befall the internet, he says. Williams cites Wu frequently. “Railroad, electricity, cable, telephone—all followed this similar pattern toward closedness and monopoly, and government regulated or not, it tends to happen because of the power of network effects and the economies of scale,” he told me.
