Two Competing Models for Information Access
The web’s original architecture was deliberately open: any device with a browser could access any website; any website could link to any other; information published on one platform was accessible from any other. This open architecture produced the interoperability and information freedom that made the web transformative, and it was a deliberate design choice rather than a technical inevitability.
The dominant platforms of the past decade have built a different architecture: social media platforms that prefer users stay within the platform for information discovery rather than following links to external sites; app stores that control which applications can be installed on which devices; messaging platforms that don’t interoperate with other messaging platforms; and payment systems that compete only within specific ecosystems. This ‘walled garden’ architecture produces better user experiences in specific ways (more consistent design, tighter integration, more personalised recommendations) and worse experiences in others (lock-in, reduced choice, platform dependency).
How Platforms Incentivise Staying Inside
The mechanisms that keep users within platform walled gardens are partly technical (features that don’t work for users who step outside the platform) and partly algorithmic (content that stays within the platform gets more distribution than content that links outside it). Facebook and Instagram have documented histories of algorithmically reducing the reach of posts containing external links relative to posts that keep users on-platform. TikTok and YouTube’s recommendation engines optimise for session time rather than information satisfaction, producing the endless scroll and autoplay that extend platform engagement.
The economic incentive is direct: platform revenue (advertising, subscriptions, transaction fees) scales with time-on-platform. Content that drives users off-platform reduces the advertising inventory that the platform can sell and the attention that revenue depends on. Platform design that maximises time-on-platform is therefore aligned with financial incentives regardless of whether it’s aligned with user interests — and whether it’s aligned with user interests in specific contexts is complicated.
The Regulatory Responses and Their Limits
The EU’s Digital Markets Act (covered in the Tech News section of Vol. 4) represents the most comprehensive regulatory attempt to enforce interoperability and open access requirements on large platform gatekeepers. Its requirements — messaging interoperability, app sideloading, no self-preferencing — address some of the most egregious walled garden practices that reduce consumer choice. The US has pursued antitrust cases (Google search distribution, Apple App Store) that address specific market-power concerns without the comprehensive interoperability framework of the EU approach.
The limits of regulatory responses: regulations address current platform practices in slowly moving legal processes while platforms evolve their practices faster than regulations can track. The interoperability requirements take years to implement after being mandated; the technical standards for cross-platform messaging are being negotiated years after the initial DMA requirement. And the regulation that successfully opens one aspect of a platform is routinely followed by the platform finding adjacent practices that achieve similar lock-in through means that the specific regulation didn’t address.
Movements Preserving the Open Web
Several technical and community movements work toward preserving the open web’s characteristics against platform enclosure. ActivityPub (the federated social networking protocol that powers Mastodon, Pixelfed, and the emerging fediverse) provides a social networking experience that doesn’t depend on any single platform company’s continued good intentions — any server can federate with any other, and users can migrate between servers without losing their social graph.
The Interledger Protocol and Web Monetisation standards provide a payment infrastructure for web content that doesn’t require integration with platform payment systems. RSS and Atom (for content syndication) and email newsletters (covered in the Internet section of Vol. 2) provide information distribution that doesn’t depend on algorithmic distribution or platform access. These technologies are used by a minority of internet users but represent the technical infrastructure for a more open information environment.
What This Means for How You Use the Internet
The practical implications of the open internet versus walled garden tension: information accessed through social platform feeds is curated by algorithms optimised for engagement rather than your information needs; seeking information through open-web search and RSS subscriptions provides less algorithmically curated and more intentionally chosen information. Building your online presence on open-web channels (your own domain with your own website, email newsletter) is more portable than building it entirely within a platform that can change its terms, algorithms, or even existence.
The user who diversifies their information sources between platform-curated feeds and open-web channels, who maintains relationships through channels they own (email list, website) alongside platform follows, and who periodically exports data from platforms they depend on heavily, is better positioned for platform changes — algorithm updates, policy changes, platform decline or shutdown — than one entirely within platform ecosystems. These are not extreme technical choices; they’re accessible practices that provide meaningful resilience against the platform dependency that the walled garden model produces.
