Why Tim Berners-Lee is no friend of Facebook
I think that in spite of Facebook and other 'walled gardens' or 'silos,' the web is more open now than it's ever been, even if it's tempting to argue otherwise. Everything you need to build a web application like Facebook is free to try and use, up to a certain amount of traffic at least. AWS, Heroku, and other platforms make it possible to develop and host a complete web application for free and to make it publicly available on the Internet for anyone to use for free. Most of the technologies that underlie Facebook are freely available as open source. There are billions of freely available tutorials and communities built around programmers helping each other for free (some of whom, I'm sure, work for Facebook). So I don't buy the notion that FB has 'pulled up the ladder behind them' so to speak, as the article insists it has. Nor do I believe that it has the power right now to do so. The only thing Facebook has done that the author seems to object to is to be extraordinarily, unprecedentedly successful. There are a lot of things I find toxic about Facebook, but I don't begrudge it its success.