> Dismantling the Web isn't anybody's strategy ...
By "web" I mean the public forum that anyone can access with a standards-compliant browser. And yes, there is such a strategy, and making money is the underlying motive.
> A strategy that makes things less convenient for consumers is a losing strategy.
Yes, unless consumers have no choice. Consider the present cell phone system -- it's perfectly terrible, and consumers can't do anything about it. The reason? Each cell phone company sells you a different interface device and tells you what you can and cannot do with it, to the degree that they now can charge you with a felony if you jailbreak their phone:
My point is that a free, public forum has every advantage (as you say) but if a company can prevent such a free forum in the name of making money, they will.
>For those who may not have understood or thought to ask, “unlocking” is not the same as “jailbreaking.” In a nutshell, jailbreaking involves making it possible for a device to run code either from sources the manufacturer did not intend the device to be able to use or to run code the manufacturer did not intend it to be able to run (though most people talk about Apple IOS devices, Sony, for example, will note that other devices can also be “jailbroken”). Unlocking, however, involves making it possible for a device intended for use on one wireless network to be used on a different network – wireless devices sold by a particular wireless company are generally, but not always, sold programmed so that they can only use that company’s network.
Jailbreaking is still legal. Also
There are a couple of factors that will disrupt the Web architecture.
The Web has trained us to build dumb clients and centralize anything of value on the server, at a huge cost and never enough trust. We can safely predict today that light-weight protocols, mediated by the mobile OS (and its Platform) will directly challenge the Web architecture, precisely because we can leverage the platform trust model. That evolution is extremely profound.
For instance, apps running on your device can securely and privately share information without requiring a complex temporal integration involving a 3rd party service (such as Google AdSense). The information is produced and consumed on the device or the device of a related end-user. What happens on your device can now stay on your device.
Just to be clear, and to show how disruptive that architecture is, the primary key of your private data becomes your phone, not your identity. Merchants no longer need to identify you. They can’t care less about YOU, they just care to know some information about you. The problem with the Web Architecture was that the only way to do that was to associate PII to a primary key on a server and hence merchants needed to identify you to track your every move (and they shamelessly did).
The second factor is just as profound: the very open nature of the Web is driving scale over scope. The Web has successfully nurtured the largest Catalog, the largest Search engine, the largest Auction site, the largest Social Network, but I see this as a negative side effect of the Web architecture because it limits the scope of what people can do. In other words, the scope of what Amazon, Google or Facebook offer is limited by the scale (and hence the revenue) they can achieve.
I actually argue that a trust-based neutral Platform will support a more vibrant and diverse ecosystem than a truly open model because in essence a Web business couples the leve of trust it can achieve with the functionality it can deliver. The Platform decouples the trust from the functionality and it enables much smaller actors to deliver a lot more scenarios while relying on the trust establish by the Platform.
All US Carriers at least allow unlocking as long as you own the phone. Emphasis on own (paid off your contract so you are no longer "renting" it or you paid for it outright). That would include all GSM phones and all Global phones on CDMA based carriers (such as the Galaxy S3 or iPhone 5).
If I'm understanding you correctly, then you're essentially arguing that the CATB analogy applies to the infrastructure of the web. Would you say that something like Diaspora is something which uses the Bazaar approach?
Secondly, given your model of what you believe the future of trust looks like - what do I do if I lose my phone? How do I 'get back in' to the Platform if my primary key gets lost?
In my view, authentication requires a third-party - one which provides the 'yay or nay' that somebody is who they say they are. If you don't have that, then your relationship with any client is one which cannot be verified: it's the equivalent of asking for an ID card without checking that it's real.
> Dismantling the Web isn't anybody's strategy ...
By "web" I mean the public forum that anyone can access with a standards-compliant browser. And yes, there is such a strategy, and making money is the underlying motive.
> A strategy that makes things less convenient for consumers is a losing strategy.
Yes, unless consumers have no choice. Consider the present cell phone system -- it's perfectly terrible, and consumers can't do anything about it. The reason? Each cell phone company sells you a different interface device and tells you what you can and cannot do with it, to the degree that they now can charge you with a felony if you jailbreak their phone:
http://internetlawforbusinesses.com/2013/01/31/how-your-cell...
My point is that a free, public forum has every advantage (as you say) but if a company can prevent such a free forum in the name of making money, they will.