A blog by Jens Ohlig

Enclosures and the Open Web

One of my most favorite places in the world is Monster Ronson’s Ichiban Karaoke in Berlin-Friedrichshain. It’s a wonderful, kitschy, and kind place to sing in karaoke booths. And it has an open API for its song catalogue. If you want a machine-readable version of all the ABBA songs on their machines, you can get it by querying a special endpoint.

In the early 2000s, much of the Web was open and weird APIs like this were common. Quite literally so: The Web during that era worked on the model of the commons. The Internet felt like it was collectively owned land, and you had access to all of its wonders. You took what you needed and left something nice behind, maybe as a hyperlink in your blog which you also offered in machine-readable form as RSS.

Today’s Web is different. It happens on closed platforms or apps and openness or free access to the underlying data of web sites is an antiquated thought from a time when people thought an expression like “Web 2.0” was cool. The internauts of 20 years ago were so silly! Didn’t they think of monetization?

The Origins of Property in Land

The destruction of the Open Web didn’t happen “naturally”. Most things don’t, they are usually socially constructed and come to an end as the result of conscious decisions being made and power being applied. In the case of the Open Web these decisions came with the restrictions of formerly Open APIs and RSS feeds.

Enclosures that create private property from an economy of the commons do not happen overnight. In England, the transformation of agriculture that led to enclosures began in the 16th century and was completed in the 19th century. The peak of enclosures was between 1760 and 1832, after which the medieval structures in Britain had all but disappeared and the concept of common land ownership no longer existed.

By the end of the transformation, the idea of land that was not privately owned had already disappeared from consciousness to such an extent that the mere thought that private land could be used to run railroads, for example, was described by liberals as “theft”.

By the 20th century, it had become almost a revolutionary statement to remind people how land ownership had come about in the first place, that it was not a natural right that had fallen from the sky, but had actually been snatched from the commons by force in a process of transformation. The English gentry had simply divided up the land of the commons among themselves, with no other legitimation than that they could use force and the state to enforce their interests. The basis of the agrarian revolution in England and Wales, the impoverishment of the rural population and the freeing up of labor for the industrial revolution had no legitimacy other than that the landed gentry had simply done it in their own interest.

The writer and journalist George Orwell who wrote a series of articles in the 1940s for the British left-wing newspaper Tribune explored this in his 1944 piece “On the Origins of Property in Land”:

If giving the land of England back to the people of England is theft, I am quite happy to call it theft. In his zeal to defend private property, my correspondent does not stop to consider how the so-called owners of the land got hold of it. They simply seized it by force, afterwards hiring lawyers to provide them with title-deeds. In the case of the enclosure of the common lands, which was going on from about 1600 to 1850, the landgrabbers did not even have the excuse of being foreign conquerors; they were quite frankly taking the heritage of their own countrymen, upon no sort of pretext except that they had the power to do so.

It was not until much later that people began to realize that economic activity can be more sustainable within the framework of the commons. Elinor Ostrom, who in 2009 became the first woman to receive the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her work on the economy of the commons, focused on the question of how people organize themselves in order to solve complex problems collectively. She analyzed how institutional rules affect the actions of individuals who are exposed to certain incentives, who (have to) make decisions and who also influence each other, and she identified practicable, fair and efficient solutions to these problems.

In Brazil and India, social movements emerged that were dedicated to the revolutionary realization that commons do not have to be fenced in by nature, but can be managed and cultivated collectively. This is not even about utopian demands such as the abolition of private property - private property would remain in place alongside the commons. It is about creating a space on an equal footing in which people work collaboratively, responsibly and together on the basis of common survival and not accepting the creation of enclosures for what was not previously enclosed without argument.

The enclosure process on the Open Web follows similar patterns. First, arbritary lines had to be drawn in the sand and public land needed to be enclosed. Although Twitter as a platform had always been a private enterprise, it was remarkably open for a long time. Content was available as RSS – even as as an Jabber/XMPP stream in the very early days – and a remarkably open API allowed anyone to see what “the Internet” was talking about right now. It was possible to feel the pulse of the public discourse before it was shut down.

Twitter drastically restricted its API access in 2023, shutting down free access and pricing basic tiers so high that most indepedant developers and researchers couldn’t afford them. This killed off hundreds of third-party tools, bots, and archival projects. As a result, academic and journalistic research became much harder. This signaled a broader push to control monetization and user experience.

In addition to open APIs, one of the cornerstone technologies that keeps the Web open is RSS—a standardized, open data format that lets users and applications automatically receive updates from websites. With RSS, you can subscribe to feeds from multiple sites and view all their latest content in one place using a news aggregator, eliminating the need to manually visit each site. These aggregators (also known as RSS readers) come in many forms: browser extensions, desktop applications, or mobile apps.

RSS is most commonly used by websites that publish frequently updated content—like blogs, news outlets, podcasts, or serialized media. Each feed, also called a “web feed” or “channel,” delivers content in a structured XML format that includes the main text (either in full or as a summary), along with metadata such as publication dates and author names. It’s a simple but powerful way to decentralize content and put control back in the hands of the user.

Facebook quietly removed RSS feeds for personal timelines and pages around 2012. They had them in the early days, but they were deprecated as the company pushed people to stay within the platform. Shutting down RSS feeds meant that there was no longer an easy way to follow updates outside of the app. Publishers and users were forced to rely on Facebook’s algorithmic feed.

Arguably the heydays of RSS came to an end when Google shut down Google Reader in 2013, the most popular RSS aggregator at the time. As a result, RSS usage dropped significantly. Google encouraged people to consume content through algorithmic platforms like Google News, Facebook, and Twitter instead. The death of Google reader was viewed by many as a turning point in the decline of the decentralized web.

And yet

The Open Web didn’t go entirely, but the Enclosures are how most people experience the Web today. There are, however, still examples of openly accessible end points. There are of course the MediaWiki Action API that gives you access to Wikipedia or the more recent Wikibase REST API for Wikidata. But there are more examples, from incredibly useful to quirky.

There are more examples of the Open Web (ActivityPub or the work of the Spritely Institute come to mind), but the Enclosure process is ongoing. The first step in reversing the trend must be to realize that privatized, locked platforms of today’s Web aren’t the original form, but the result of applied power. Like land ownership, the privatized Web is the result of the tech gentry deciding to actively destroy the commons.

#openweb #api #rss #enclosures #commons