walled garden

English

Noun

walled garden (plural walled gardens)

  1. A garden enclosed by walls for purposes of shelter or decoration.
    • 1912, Joseph Conrad, chapter IV, in A Smile of Fortune:
      The walled garden full of shadows blazed with colour as if the flowers were giving up the light absorbed during the day.
    • 2016 January 16, Sarah Howe, “The Saturday poem: The Walled Garden”, in The Guardian‎, →ISSN:
      You cannot walk the other side because
      the walled garden meets the road direct
      in pools of spangled tarmac after rain;
      the open gutter choking up with leaves.
  2. (figurative, media, technology) A closed platform for content or services controlled by a single carrier or service provider, typically requiring subscription to access.
    • 2000 September 4, “AOL's 'Walled Garden'”, in Wall Street Journal‎:
      A long time ago, back before Al Gore invented the Internet, there were three big kids on the online block, each of which ran its own proprietary online service. America Online, Prodigy and CompuServe each had a "walled garden" of sorts for their customers.
    • 2007, Wes Simpson, Howard Greenfield, IPTV and Internet video, →ISBN, page 39:
      AOL tried to provide a walled garden for all their subscribers in the early 1990s.
    • 2016, Woody Leonhard, Windows 10 All-In-One For Dummies, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 885:
      When you deal with iPhones and iPads (and the iCloud, iMacs, iTVs, iPods, and all those other iThingies), you're living in a walled garden. Apple controls it from the beginning to end.
    • 2017, Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, Atlantic Books, →ISBN:
      The walled garden made AOL money, some of it real, but also hastened the site's loss of allure to the Internet, whose open design was the opposite of AOL's, and which was by now growing a greater variety of things to see and do.
    • 2023 May 17, Charlie Warzel, “Here’s How AI Will Come for Your Job”, in The Atlantic‎:
      The content sludge is also present in Big Tech’s plans to reimagine search as an interactive, chatbot-powered walled garden.
  3. (Internet) A set of web pages or other resources that are richly interlinked and share a common focus, but have little or no linkage to or from the larger network.
    • 2007, Michael A. Banks, Blogging Heroes, →ISBN, page 52:
      Link love is reciprocal; if you provide it liberally, it comes back to you. If you don't, you'll turn into your own walled garden.

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