The cover story in next month’s Wired has an essay by editor Chris Anderson (“The Long Tail”) in which he argues that the open Internet is on its way to obsolescence.  The folks at The Atlantic Wire have links to the story, to a companion piece by gadfly Michael Wolff, and to a number of blog posts arguing the point.

Wired Declares the Death of the Web: Too Soon?
People don’t use the Internet like they used to. Have you noticed? Wired magazine’s Chris Anderson has. And in his lengthy new cover story The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet he argues that the Web browser is being replaced by applications and semi-closed platforms like iPhone apps, Facebook, iTunes and TweetDeck. The result is the end of the open Web as we know it. “Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display,” Anderson writes:

Blame human nature. As much as we intellectually appreciate openness, at the end of the day we favor the easiest path. We’ll pay for convenience and reliability, which is why iTunes can sell songs for 99 cents despite the fact that they are out there, somewhere, in some form, for free. When you are young, you have more time than money, and LimeWire is worth the hassle. As you get older, you have more money than time. The iTunes toll is a small price to pay for the simplicity of just getting what you want. The more Facebook becomes part of your life, the more locked in you become. Artificial scarcity is the natural goal of the profit-seeking.

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AtlanticWire.com