The article doesn&#x27;t define the &quot;open web,&quot; and platforms like Facebook and Twitter would seem to mostly follow the dictates set out in Tantek&#x27;s original definition.[1] So it&#x27;s hard to guess at what the author means -- Facebook and Twitter aren&#x27;t &quot;the open web&quot; by tautology, basically. It&#x27;s really hard to engage with the author&#x27;s arguments that way.<p>What is trivial to understand is that the author&#x27;s proposed remedy doesn&#x27;t work:<p>&gt; The answer is simple, but it isn’t easy. We need to stop pretending that content is free. Publications need to ask readers to pay for their content directly, and readers need to be willing to give up money, as opposed to their privacy and attention. This means that publications will have to abandon the rapid-growth business models driven by display ads, which have driven them to rely on Facebook for millions of pageviews a month.<p>The fundamental problem with this is that siloing content the way the author suggests (publications with strong identities and paywalls to get readers to give money in exchange for content) breaks hyperlinks. It breaks sharing. Paywalls work when there&#x27;s a marginal benefit to knowing something that someone else doesn&#x27;t -- say, it helps you pick stocks better than the next guys. Otherwise, all else being equal, the article I can share with my friends, link to in my blog post, that I can engage with and respond to and have other people able to read the same article I am -- that&#x27;s far more valuable than the article that I can read but can&#x27;t share. We didn&#x27;t get here because we&#x27;re all stupid, or because people are unwilling to pay for anything ever. We got here because we were trying to come up with a model that allows people who make content to be compensated for it without betraying the fundamental thing that made the Web the Web -- the hyperlink. If your proposed alternative business model doesn&#x27;t even TRY to engage with the question of linking and sharing, it&#x27;s not going to work.<p>1) <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tantek.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;281&#x2F;b1&#x2F;what-is-the-open-web" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tantek.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;281&#x2F;b1&#x2F;what-is-the-open-web</a>