Today, leading Web companies like Amazon and Google are carefully but enthusiastically opening up to this trend. Amazon talked up its Web-services initiative at the O'Reilly conference, positioning itself as less a retailer than a "technology platform" for third parties who can build their own storefronts on the foundation of its software. And for some time Google has provided outsiders with a limited-use key to its API (a set of programming "hooks" that give developers access to some of Google's inner workings). That's why you are seeing bits and pieces of both these companies' services distributed in increasingly far-flung ways across the Web.

Both Amazon and Google are software-driven companies that have always embraced Web idealism, providing great, usable resources to the public -- Amazon's book and music catalog, Google's unrivaled map of the Web itself -- as a fundamental part of their business. Both firms clearly believe that, by moving their basic resource beyond the home Web site and into Web-services-driven nooks and crannies all over the Net, they will reap business rewards.

But it's hard to believe that everyone out there is going to be as enthusiastic. Think of eBay. It was only three years ago that the leading Web auction site sued another company for grabbing auction listings and republishing them. What could be more "Web services"-like?

Now, it could be that eBay's managers have experienced a change of heart since 2000 and are exploring the deconstruction of their site themselves. But I kind of doubt it. They have an enormous advantage based on the sheer volume of auction listings assembled in one place on their Web site, and it's hard to imagine what incentive could induce them to give it up. Helping advance the general good of the Web isn't going to be enough.

Aren't a lot of companies with valuable Web resources going to resist the "deconstruction" of their assets into parts for others to reassemble? I posed this question to O'Reilly, and his answer -- essentially, that those who resist this wave of change will eventually fall by the wayside -- was optimistic but not entirely persuasive.

In the long run, I suppose, on a decade-long timeline, Web pages as we know them could well disappear, dimming the future of those who tied their businesses too closely to an aging technology. On the other hand, as we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Mosaic browser and you now read this column through your Web browser, let's observe a moment of silence for those starry-eyed future gazers of the mid-1990s who told us how rapidly HTML would vanish into the "push"-enabled, broadband-turbocharged, multimedia-enhanced future.

I don't mean to suggest there isn't a bright future for the cool stuff that developers are doing with Web services. But I think it's naive not to forecast some bruising conflicts between the creators and users of Web services on the one hand, and companies resisting what they see as an intrusion on their right to deploy their data exclusively for their own benefit.

If it were simply a conflict between technology on the march and business-as-usual, optimism might be warranted. But the law is a crucial third player in this game. And as we've seen from the online-music wars and the fight over the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the legal system can be readily rigged to favor the status quo.

It's easy to imagine a situation in which some enterprising developer discovers an open door to some Web site's data and walks in and builds a "Web service" around it, without asking or paying. The company then sues the developer. Probably, the company is within its rights. But before you know it, there's legislation afoot and Congress starts drawing lines around what Web software is allowed to do -- lines that make little sense but that satisfy a well-heeled constituency.

If such a scenario starts to play out, the geek world of the O'Reilly conference will have to rethink its historical aversion to political action.

In a panel on the future of "digital rights management," which the participants suggested should be renamed "digital restrictions management," Joe Kraus -- the Excite founder, now leader of Digitalconsumer.org -- urged a campaign to reframe the debate, painting it less as a fight between Hollywood and Silicon Valley and more as a conflict between "incumbents and innovators." More bluntly, Cory Doctorow -- the science fiction writer, blogger and Electronic Frontier Foundation activist -- urged, in a discussion of how the Internet populace failed to defend Napster: "Let's not scatter like roaches when they turn the lights on."

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