In Tim Berners-Lee’s Long Live the Web, he made a very interesting point on the difference of using HTTP as an open standard system and using iTunes as a closed standard system by Apple. He thinks that the closed worlds are not going to grow as much as the open worlds, and says “If a walled garden has too tight a hold on a market, however, it can delay that outside growth.” However, many evidences have pointed out that since Apple as a company expanded its business, many software developers are developing softwares for iOS and MacOS systems besides the ones compatible to the Windows system.As a result, there are more applications in the iTunes realm. Also, Apple has expanded its acceptance to the Web which uses HTTP instead of iTunes so there are more people in its target market.
In both Tim Berners-Lee’s Long Live the Web and Ingrid Burrington’s The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud, the idea of violation of Internet citizen rights are discussed to a great length. This topic is very controversial since the day of the birth of Internet and the World Wide Web. Both authors tried a different approach to explaining this phenomenon.
In his article, Berners-Lee viewed the violation through his explanations of the basic terms which forms the Internet as we know it today. Firstly, he claimed that the Web is an online location where free speech is protected. Then he said that the Web is where people practice free speech the most, and that universality is a huge factor in how people use the Web globally. However, many countries are trying to prevent the uses of what they call improper usage of the Internet. In Berners-Lee’s words, there are no improper uses since the Internet or the Web is the main medium for freedom of speech nowadays. In Ingrid Burrington’s The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud, he dedicated the majority of the article to the discussion of human rights on the Web. He gave the example of Microsoft and Deutsche Telekom’s data storage and the access of data from these two storages. Of course, the example was talked about by Burrington through the two companies’ perspective and especially the U.S. perspective. However, from this part, there are questions which rose up of how would the data center of Deutsche Telekom be different from Microsoft when it comes to the data usage in building private digital profiles of people and its harms and benefits from the global citizen perspective. This is a very interesting point since he also talked about other companies like Amazon and Alibaba, which still the same questions remain.