What are these dangers?
The dangers of a web monoculture are multiple. A few important ones outlined:
- There is the danger of information manipulation, information control or even censorship-through-omission. For example, if you rely just on one publisher (or rather publishing company) to provide you with your news, it is all too easy to have this company, for any arbitrary reason, prevent certain things from being published. For example, if news would put the company or any of its affiliates in a negative light. If this is your only outlet of news, deliberate omissions like that will keep you, the consumer of news, in the dark about what might otherwise be important information for you.
- There is the danger of "bubbling", which is catering search results on the web to someone's personal profile (their bubble) of e.g. gender, race, political persuasion, etc. For more information on that, please see the explanation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
- There is the danger of financial manipulation. For example, if you need software, and if your only choice is a single certain "store" to get all your needs, whomever operates the store gets to decide which software and at which price points (e.g. through selective assortment, restrictive publishing agreements or required price points) is going to be available to you. Another measure of control and restriction.
- There is the danger of anti-competitive practice. If your provider has a product or an affiliate that can offer a certain product, and that product is the only or preferred product offered, then there is an unfair disadvantage to any other company creating or publishing a similar product. This too, ties in, in the case of software, with single-vendor "stores" as mentioned above.
Why is choice important?
On the web, choice is important because all people have varying needs and desires. If your audience is the world, it is impossible to cater to everyone's background and mindset because of social, cultural, financial, biological and technological differences and often polar opposites. Not just choice, though, but rather free choice. Choice presented equally, without strings, for people to evaluate and pick what works best for them.
In other words, choice offers degrees of freedom, and should be anyone's right. If you limit people's choices of what is available, then you are almost certainly limiting their freedom, as well.
In addition, having freedom of choice also keeps the web healthy, because it will require that products are maintained and improved to be favored (as opposed to being the only option available).
The current state of things: we are at a point where the monoculture is becoming real.
What prompted me to organize my thoughts on this matter in this blog is the realization that we are at a point in time where the web monoculture is becoming real. A realization sparked by getting feedback from one of our supporters (Stephen F.) providing some food for thought and a slice of life regarding Pale Moon and using it to actually introduce choice where there previously was none.
This little bit of feedback sketches a disturbing development, but one that is very real: a situation where school management decides that teaching "the internet" to students is easiest and best streamlined if the curriculum exclusively uses Google: Google "office", Google reference material (maps, etc.), the Google Chrome browser, and the Google search engine. While a good choice from an organization point of view, it is a bad choice from an educational point of view. What students and teachers are exposed to is a collection of software all provided by a single company, which isn't a representation of the actual 'net, providing no choice or alternatives since there is no reason for Google to do so if they have the products all in-house that would reasonably be needed to fill the entire curriculum. With teachers also not being aware of choice and alternatives, it becomes a bigger problem because they will never suggest that students look beyond Google for anything, and keeping everything within the increasingly walled garden of Google services.Stephen F. wrote:Been pushing Pale Moon out in the Dearborn School District in Michigan. The district uses Google Apps for education - one result is most everyone, teachers and students, think there is only one browser (most do not know the term browser) and only one search engine (the concept of a search engine eludes many [sic] too). Fighting
back to show there are options. So, thank you.
Now, this isn't something exclusive to Google, either, so please don't take this post as another "anti-Google" rant (even though those are regularly well-deserved), and similar things are happening with Microsoft, with Bing, Live services and the Microsoft Store. Possibly even worse there with the absorption of social media in their services. A different school district may decide to do the same but then on the Microsoft side, with the same dangers.
With Pale Moon being introduced there, with it comes a sudden wealth of choice: the start portal, for example, opens up a whole new world of non-Google services that offer alternatives and different selections of news, software, entertainment and reference materials. It also shows that there are, indeed, different pieces of software that can do the same thing (i.e. the browser) and that there is freedom to choose whichever works best for people, instead of just accepting a single provider for everything.
A positive development, enabled by Pale Moon, and executed by someone who makes a stand for a free and more neutral Internet. Something most of you who read this can likely also do in your own environment!