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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. This architecture — not the specific applications built on top of it — is the revolution

Today the content you see in your browser — largely HTML data delivered via the http protocol on port 80 — accounts for less than a quarter of the traffic on the Internet … and it’s shrinking.

This was all inevitable. It is the cycle of capitalism. The story of industrial revolutions, after all, is a story of battles over control. A technology is invented, it spreads, a thousand flowers bloom, and then someone finds a way to own it, locking out others. It happens every time.

The rise of machine-to-machine communications — iPhone apps talking to Twitter APIs — is all about control. Every API comes with terms of service, and Twitter, Amazon.com, Google, or any other company can control the use as they will

Our appetite for discovery slows as our familiarity with the status quo grows.

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 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.

When it comes to the applications that run on top of the Net, people are starting to choose quality of service. We want TweetDeck to organize our Twitter feeds because it’s more convenient than the Twitter Web page.

the open Internet has always been a fiction. It was only because we confused the Web with the Net that we didn’t see it

Today the Internet hosts countless closed gardens; in a sense, the Web is an exception, not the rule.

The defenders of the unfettered Web have their hopes set on HTML5 — the latest version of Web-building code that offers applike flexibility — as an open way to satisfy the desire for quality of service

the notion of the Web as the ultimate marketplace for digital delivery is now in doubt

The Internet is the real revolution, as important as electricity; what we do with it is still evolving. As it moved from your desktop to your pocket, the nature of the Net changed. The delirious chaos of the open Web was an adolescent phase subsidized by industrial giants groping their way in a new world. Now they’re doing what industrialists do best — finding choke points. And by the looks of it, we’re loving it.

The truth is that the Web has always had two faces. On the one hand, the Internet has meant the breakdown of incumbent businesses and traditional power structures. On the other, it’s been a constant power struggle, with many companies banking their strategy on controlling all or large chunks of the TCP/IP-fueled universe

Google was the endpoint of this process: It may represent open systems and leveled architecture, but with superb irony and strategic brilliance it came to almost completely control that openness. It’s difficult to imagine another industry so thoroughly subservient to one player. In the Google model, there is one distributor of movies, which also owns all the theaters

a bunch of megalomaniacs who want to own the entirety of the world

Its very attraction was that it was a closed system.

Facebook became a parallel world to the Web, an experience that was vastly different and arguably more fulfilling and compelling and that consumed the time previously spent idly drifting from site to site

The Web of countless entrepreneurs was being overshadowed by the single entrepreneur-mogul-visionary model, a ruthless paragon of everything the Web was not: rigid standards, high design, centralized control.

e Web was built by engineers, not editors. So nobody paid much attention to the fact that HTML-constructed Web sites — the most advanced form of online media and design — turned out to be a pretty piss-poor advertising medium.

this medium rendered powerless the marketers and agencies that might have been able to turn this chaotic mess into an effective selling tool

Nearly 60 percent of people find Web sites from search engines, much of which may be driven by SEO, or “search engine optimization” — a new-economy acronym that refers to gaming Google’s algorithm to land top results for hot search terms. In other words, many of these people have been essentially corralled into clicking a random link and may have no idea why they are visiting a particular site — or, indeed, what site they are visiting. They are the exact opposite of a loyal audience, the kind that you might expect, over time, to inculcate with your message.

Finally, after years of experimentation, content companies came to a disturbing conclusion: The Web did not work. It would never bring in the bucks. And so they began looking for a new model, one that leveraged the 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.

While Google may have controlled traffic and sales, Apple controls the content itself.

it controls both the content-delivery system (iTunes) and the devices (iPods, iPhones, and iPads) through which that content is consumed