[rbarooah]

I agree that you don't get my point.

The reason Google hasn't built a walled garden around the internet because they simply don't yet have the power to do that.

You talk as if it was something they could easily have done but have chosen not to. I disagree. They just aren't in a position to do it.

It makes no sense at all to say that innovation on the web has vanished because of the Appstore. We are in in a boom time for internet startups, and we have healthy browser competition leading to web standards advancing much faster than at any time in the past.

There is room for both the open web, and for more controlled environments like the app store or Facebook to coexist and compete with one another. Each offers different tradeoffs.

The existence of different kinds of environment is a good thing. It provides a variety of different economic opportunities, and choices for consumers.

Google would naturally like to have more influence and control, but the reality is that they exist in a competitive environment.

[tferris]

Pardon, you are totally misleading.

Google could do this—there are multiple options to silently wallgarden the user. Just check how much traffic Google moves. If they want they could arbitrarily redirect traffic and subtly punish user's not using their tools.

But that's not their culture. Just look at their products, how far they pushing the boundaries and still stay open, give back and contribute to the community. Look at V8, Dart, Go—all open, all free, all top-notch, all following the Internet's principles and look at Apple, FB—I see no groundbreaking innovation that's free or not protecting their walled garden. Even if Google has some hidden agenda with their products (like with Chrome) the products are always best-of-breed and never deadlock the user.

The point is: Google benefits of an open Internet, their business model is fully based on an open Internet. Therefore they will do everything to keep the Internet neutral, free and decentralized. In contrast, the bizmodels of Apple and FB do not rely on these values, they need walled gardens. Enough reasons to trust them less.

RE-EDIT: Took out later added passages as wished.

[j_col]

Facebook have given back plenty of open source to the dev community. Scribe (their federated logging server) and HipHop (their PHP compiler) come to mind immediately, but there may be others.

[zerostar07]

Their business tactics are ridiculously sleazy though. Aside from the google smear campaign fiasco last year, do you know that facebook does not allow AdSense advertising on it's 3rd party applications? They don't want FB ads performance to be compared with Google's (more profitable ads) on the same pages.

[j_col]

I somewhat agree. Frankly I'm no fan off Google, Facebook, or Apple. But pretending that one of them is more "open" then the other because they open source some software now and again is a falsehood: they are all for-profit corporations, with more in common with each other then what separates them, notions of culture aside.

[j_col]

> (please don't mention some minor FB side-products; Apple has tons of innovative products but none of them is free).

Please don't rewrite your original comment after I've responded, not cool.

[tferris]

You are right, I re-edited and took the passage out (as written below I wasn't able to reply before directly).

[j_col]

Thanks for that.

[mindcrime]

Scribe (their federated logging server) and HipHop (their PHP compiler) come to mind immediately, but there may be others.

Thrift[1] and Cassandra[2] as well, FWIW.

[1]: http://thrift.apache.org

[2]: http://cassandra.apache.org/

[rbarooah]

You've actually made my point for me. "Redirecting traffic and subtly punishing users" is far from a walled garden, and would lead to an instant backlash if detected.

As I said, they don't have the power to close the internet that you attribute to them. This has nothing to do with their culture, however great you might think it is.

[tferris]

Discussing a hairsplitting definition of a walled garden doesn't make sense here. Google do not deadlock wether users nor site owner/publishers (referred above as "users" as well) to use their products but they could as explained above (deadlock=walled garden).

[rbarooah]

It sounds as though you are now claiming that Google has already turned the Internet into a Walled Garden but are simply nicer in their policies than anyone else.

This is the first time I've heard anyone make this claim.

[Sargis]

Google's mission is to display their ads to as many people as possible. How is a walled garden going to help achieve that goal?

[rbarooah]

...because Google left the Internet's core like it is and didn't build a walled garden around it.

The commenter I was replying to claimed that Google chose not to build a walled garden around the internet because of their good character.

If they were able to do this, they'd be able to limit the threat of Facebook and other advertising based competitors.

They haven't done it simply because they can't. Not because it wouldn't be to their advantage.

[Natsu]

> The reason Google hasn't built a walled garden around the internet because they simply don't yet have the power to do that.

Google has more power than many others who have built walled gardens in the past.