Response to: The data wars article by Josh McHugh.

 After reading the article my overall impression was that the author did not entirely see eye to eye with companies like Google and Microsoft on the subject of “scraping” The article implies that these big Net players are hypocritical in that while they are stopping others from “scraping” they continue to allow themselves to be “scraped” by their related companies.

The author quotes Allen Morgan, a venture capitalist in America. Morgan says that “as those data providers [such as Amazon] help power more applications, they take on the role of operating systems – with a vested interest in consolidating their power”. He then says “inevitably, they will feel compelled to compete with application developers in order to grow their business – and it’s an unfair fight.”

I look at this article and see that the corporate companies like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft should understand that the web was originally developed to be an open source place where anyone with a computer and the know how could display information for free.

With the web 2.0 is looming on the horizon it is becoming easier and more accessible to find information that you want. So by restricting access to that information you are going against the fundamental rules of the web.