INTERNET

Webstill alive but changing, studysays

By Benny Evangelista

Two years ago, Wired magazine famously declared that “the Web is dead” because of the rise of mobile apps.

But a new report released Friday by the PewResearch Center found that a majority of experts and futurists surveyed believe the Web is verymuch alive— but changing inaway that could make it more closed, controlled and overlymonetized by 2020. “Giant interests will push every button they can: fear, inexperience, passivity and willingness to be entertained,” the report quotes Harvard professor and former White House technology official Susan Crawford as saying. “We’ll get a cleaned-upworld that we can be perfectly billed for.”

Crawford was one of 1,021 technology experts, academics and pundits who took part in the survey conducted by the Pew Internet& American Life Project and Elon University of North Carolina.

Wired’s cover story inAugust 2010 raised the issue of whether the increasing popularity of apps that easily connect users to specific sites or tasks were bringing about the demise of the wideopen Web in favor of a closed, profit-driven Internet. Since then, the consumer shift toward mobile devices and apps has become even more pronounced. The Pew study, conducted between Aug. 28 and Oct. 31,

Apps could be a double-edged sword


2011, asked experts such as Crawford, Google chief economist Hal Varian and author and journalist Jeff Jarvis to look into that future. Fifty-nine percent of those surveyed agreed that in 2020, the Webwould be “stronger than ever in users’ lives” and that apps accessed through so-called “anti-Internet” devices like the iPad, Kindle and smart phones “will be useful as specialized options for a finite number of information and entertainment functions.”

But 35 percent of the experts agreed that in eight years, most people will prefer apps over the open Web and that most of the innovation will be centered on app development, making the Web “less important and useful than in the past.”

Both scenarios bring positive and negative implications. The “apps’ tremendous ability to meet specific needs becomes a double-edged sword — apps simplify life but they also create ‘walled gardens’ and a lack of serendipity,” said Janna Quitney Anderson, author of the report and an Elon University associate professor of communications.

She is also director of the university’s Imagining the Internet Center.

Some fear the next generation of online denizens might lack the tools that spur discovery and innovation. The fear is “wemight end up in a packaged, controlled and oversimplified space,” Anderson said in an interview. “The underlying concern here is let’s just make sure we really know where we’re going and what we’re doing.”

Here are some comments in the report:

1“ Instead of couch potatoes, you’ll have app potatoes.”— Giacomo Mazzone, head of institutional relations for the European Broadcasting Union.

1“ The WorldWide Webmay evolve significantly, but the core design of open and scalable will make it the compelling solution.”— Robert Cannon, Federal Communications Commission senior counsel for Internet law.

1“ The Web is about discovery and serendipity, it’s about finding something youweren’t looking for; to lose that would be to take a step back in our progress as intellectual humans, the equivalent of burning a digital book.”— venture capitalist Richard Titus, founder of Octavian Ventures.

1“ The browser— or its future equivalent — will continue to have key advantages over apps … Publishers have dreamed that apps would return to them the control of content, experience, business model and pricing that the Net took from them, but they are merely deluding themselves.”— Jeff Jarvis, author of “What Would Google Do?”

bevangelista@sfchronicle.com