Re: Amazon Silk

Hi Mark,

On Sep 29, 2011, at 00:18 , Mark Nottingham wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:04:22 +0200, Robin Berjon wrote:
>> That is not to say that we should be rosy eyed and naïve, simply that
>> such analogies can only lead to caricatural conclusions in a complex —
>> and increasingly so — mesh of a situation. Rather, we need to find a
>> way to implement checks and balances.
> 
> Agreed, but it's devaluing the Web, and that makes me cranky.

Is it really devaluing the Web or is it addressing a technical need that we don't cover? Being methodologically averse to assuming malice and having used Opera Mini on a phone that you could pretty much give away as one does USB sticks I think that such accelerator services are actually useful. And that's in a country with decent Wifi and 3G coverage — I'm not even talking about places where you might have to sell a few organs to meet your monthly VSAT fees.

One good way of enabling checks and balances is to ensure there is competition; and one good way of ensuring there is competition is by creating open standards. That brings us out of cranky politics and back to the cranky sausage factories that we know and love.

So if these are indeed needs, then maybe we should make it possible (and easier) for people to choose who they trust to accelerate their browsing, as opposed to having a platform on which you can get fast browsing from the tied-in browser, and a dog slow experience from all the others. (Note that this isn't just a Silk issue — Google's services use SPDY with Chrome to make it much faster, something which people would be screaming bloody murder about had say Microsoft tried it).

Is that something we believe we should be doing? If so, it might be worth looking at what's actually going on in those stacks. If not, we should probably find something else to get cranky about ;-)

> In an alternate Universe, the W3C would have more control over the brand that is "the Web" (e.g., with a certification program, which is a notoriously difficult place for a standards body to go). I'm not sure if it would be a better or worse universe.

I honestly can't think of a single case in which such an approach actually went well; but maybe it's just because we only hear of the failures.

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Thursday, 29 September 2011 10:31:00 UTC