The Web is Open‽ Most of what the Web offers today has evolved
because it was based on open standards. But this was never
guaranteed. When the Internet first became widely used by
ordinary people, in the early to mid-1990s, a number of media
and telecom companies like AOL, Compuserve and MSN vied to build
their own “walled garden” services. The idea was that users
would stay most of their time within closed networks owned by
these companies, using their own information services,
communicating mainly with other subscribers to the same
service—and paying, not just for connectivity, the bits and
bytes of getting online, but also, and mainly, for access to
information, and even for the right to produce information
themselves. In the end, this business model was eroded by the
explosion in use of open Internet standards. These companies
were forced first to provide access to it to stay competitive,
and ultimately to compete as Internet Service Providers with
others such as telecom companies simply to sell connectiv