Regarding Media, What is a Walled Garden?

"Walledgarden" is an environment that controls user access to applications, web pages, and services. The walled garden restricts users to a specific range, only allows users to access or enjoy specified content, applications or services, and prohibits or restricts users from accessing or enjoying other unauthorized ones.

Walled garden

Right!

"Walledgarden" is an environment that controls user access to applications, web pages, and services. The walled garden restricts users to a specific range, only allows users to access or enjoy specified content, applications or services, and prohibits or restricts users from accessing or enjoying other unauthorized ones.

Chinese name

Walled garden

Foreign name

walledgarden

Belong to

Internet services

Explanation

Limit users to a specific range

in

Internet service providers may allow users to choose between sites included in or outside the "walled garden". Although the "walled garden" does not actually prevent users from accessing things outside the wall, it makes accessing content outside the wall more difficult than accessing content inside.

There are many reasons for service providers to fence walls. For example, in 1999, AOL Children s Channel established a walled garden to prevent users from visiting inappropriate websites. However, a common reason for building a garden is the resulting profit: Operators direct users to the partner's website, but not to the competitor's website. Because wireless devices such as mobile phones can usually only access websites that are restricted to a certain range, this part of the website is a walled garden for wireless users.

Speaking of the entire network, AOL can be said to be the main and most successful practitioner of the walled garden solution. According to an authoritative source, 85% of AOL users have never left AOL territory, and according to economists, 40% of the time Americans spend online is in the U.S. walled gardens. The invention of the term "walled garden" belongs to John Malone, a former owner of AT & T, a telecommunications company that acquired Malone.

The Internet adheres to the idea of "end-to-end transparency", which brings the openness of the network and gives control of content, applications and services to

Currently the most successful terminal-based walled garden is the Apple iOS system, which has downloaded more than half of global mobile applications. In the portal-based walled garden mode, users can easily access the portal or services on the designated portal (services of ISPs or partners) through the portal, or only registered users can access the protected services, It may also not allow access by external search engines. This type of walled garden is designed to provide "protection" at the application layer, typically Facebook, Twitter, etc.

The core method of the walled garden model's success is stretching and pulling together. One is to be able to attract users, and the other is to be able to control users. Therefore, the "flowers" in the garden should be enough and good enough to attract people to spend in the garden. They cannot be all ISPs, terminals, or websites. They need to introduce third-party developers. Terminal manufacturers invented the terminal-based AppStore mode, and the website invented the website-based WEB2.0 mode. Although the wall is still there, they have successfully attracted many followers. And network operators are not good at "growing flowers" themselves, and they lack attractive ideas in cultivating and introducing third-party "flower growers", even asking for too much price (for example, there were operators with a ratio of up to 5: 5) and other reasons The fate of this network-based walled garden is inevitable.

The earliest impact of the operator's walled garden model came from Yahoo. Yahoo has adopted a completely open and free way to provide Internet content services, laying the foundation for the global Internet game rules. With the development and popularization of open and free, broadband and PC terminals, a large number of Internet companies have risen and have begun to impact operators, and the wall first fell from fixed Internet services with the weakest monopoly power. With the popularization of 3G and other wireless broadband and smart phones, the walled garden of mobile Internet has also collapsed. The stronger the website, the smarter the terminal, and the wider the bandwidth, the easier it will be to overthrow the network-based fence. The network-based wall fell, and the operator's dream of the wall was shattered, but the Internet has not been more open and free because the new wall has been built again. This time, the means of controlling users has changed from controlling the network to controlling terminals and websites, and from network operators to mobile terminal operators and websites.

In 2008, Apple built a new walled garden on the iPhone with the AppStore. Facebook's nearly 1 billion users and Twitter's 140 million user information are a large and closed garden. Only Bing, a Microsoft company that has equity and strategic cooperation, can search and access it. If high-quality resources are further controlled in the website, open search engines such as Google and Baidu will only be able to find food in the "junk" of information. Why is everyone keen on building fences on the open Internet? There is only one reason for disclosure: to protect users. The latest statistics from security company TrendMicro found that the open Google Android system malware is growing at an alarming rate, from 5,000 in early 2012 to 20,000 now, and is expected to grow to 130,000 by the fourth quarter of 2014, and there are Many malicious applications have been downloaded more than 700,000 times. Although closed AppleiOS also has some malicious plagiarism applications, the number is much smaller.

There is another reason behind the fence: maximum control over users and resources. Whether it is a website, a network, or a terminal service provider, they hope to hold user resources in their own hands through the fence and build their own industry chain. When the total global market value is only 77 Apple companies, it is the best proof of the success of the Apple Walled Garden model. Of course, Yahoo didn't build a fence at that time, not because of the bodhisattva's heart, but because the weak Yahoo couldn't use the fence at all, and competed with telecommunications giants such as AOL. Similarly, Google is a latecomer in the field of mobile smart terminals. It is impossible to retake the road of Apple's walled garden, so it chose the open source and open road in the opposite direction.

Controversy over the legality of the "walled garden" was provoked by Internet companies such as Google and ebay a few years ago. Their main competitors at that time were network operators, so they mainly focused on the network-based walled garden model. Internet companies consider the network to be a public infrastructure, anyone can transmit data on the network equally, and ISPs must not place any discriminatory restrictions or charges on the transmission on the Internet, which is the principle of network neutrality. Internet companies represented by Apple, Facebook and Twitter, on the one hand, enjoy the benefits of net neutrality, and on the other, they are stepping up the construction of their own walls. The network is neutral (partial), but the terminal may not be neutral, and the website may not be neutral. The openness of the Internet and the walls are two sides of the same coin. Building a fence on the Internet is technically unreasonable, but it is reasonable from a security and business perspective. The commercialized Internet should make corresponding amendments and developments to a completely open technical architecture. Without affecting users participation in innovation, embed some management and control mechanisms (but not necessarily walls ) that are transparent to users in the network, suppress users unregulated behavior, and balance responsibilities between different roles in the industry chain And interests. The core concept of Internet technology is "end-to-end transparency", which is opaque in business. The core idea of the future Internet should be "conditional end-to-end transparency." In the future, the construction and demolition of fences will continue to happen on the Internet.