The web is dead?

The following is a brief comment on an article by Wired Magazine:

Once people thought the internet was the be-all end-all but now mobile device apps are on the scene. They don't sit on the web, they utilize it for transport and they're in your pocket. Apps are more about getting, less about searching. Life now is about peer to peer file transfers, email, company VPNs, machine to machine communication like Skype, VOIP phones and things like streaming movies with Netflix. It seems people really do prefer speed over flexibility. It's so much easier to update your Facebook status on your phone that it is to find a laptop.

When the web first started, the playing field was open. It wasn't 'monopolized' because everything was so new and fresh. People could design and implement whatever they wanted but are we now moving from that capitalist state of being to a more communistic state? Why do I say that? It's the big fish that are taking over the monopoly. Out of the milieu of websites and web portals has arisen a few who have grown extremely large—Facebook, Google, Apple—are just a few of the big dogs enticing and servicing a lot of the market. There is an increasing 'oligopoly', a smaller number of producers or sellers controlling much of the information. The rich definitely are getting richer and among these big dogs there are struggles for visibility and control. It's interesting that Google cannot crawl the iPhone apps and that Facebook don't let Google search through its servers. There does seem to be an increasing 'battle for the soul of the digital frontier.' The understanding that the web is the only place for the delivery of digital media is definitely becoming an idea of the past.

I think it's interesting that we see this same progression in all of human history. There is an idea—in this case the internet—that someone has, that idea is realized and as it grows becomes a platform that opens the door for so many smaller entrepreneurs but does that door seem to be closing now because a few people have cornered the market? They understand how these 'closed gardens' work and they've maximized on it. Facebook now has some 400 million registered users and Apple has sold over 10 billion songs!

I think there will always be a use for the internet despite the growing number of apps and the change in how we use the internet. Or maybe it will be a slow death, like you can still buy LPs but they're almost obsolete. You can't yet get rid of the need for larger screens, to be able to trawl large amounts of information and to be able to use sites for informational purposes but will the bigger conglomerates take over to such an extent that it will shut the smaller sites down? Will they in a communistic type way begin to control or govern even more to where what they say will become the national or international standards? Does Marx's idea that communism is inevitable hold water? I think not. Surely one system grows and then dies and gives way to another. Isn't that the way it always goes?