I just read one of the most succinct and spot on explanations of the back room dealings that are going on when it comes to the motives behind Apple’s move to the cloud. There is one caveat here – I don’t always agree with Dave Winer but in this case I think he has definitely hit the nail on the head.

His post was in response to the recent talk and speculation about Apple’s building of a massive data center and it’s recent moves to “close the holes” in web standards.

I had a phone talk with John Gruber from Daring Fireball the other day, which I requested, after reading a piece he wrote suggesting that Apple’s closing of the Flash hole in the iPhone/iPad was a way to enforce “web standards.” I said it’s a lot simpler and more insidious. Apple doesn’t care about web standards, nor do any other large companies. That term, and “open” are just fig leaves that cover up what they’re reallly doing. Instead of opening things up, they’re doing just the opposite. Closing as many holes as they can as quickly as they can. Because they’re doing what the media business wants to but hasn’t been able to do, yet — control and monetize user programming of content. Apple and many (if not all) of the tech companies want to get the control back from the users. Of course they can’t say this, and they won’t. But actions speak louder than words.

Then I read this article in CNET that says Apple wants to cut a deal with the entertainment industry to store all their content on Apple servers. There’s a chilling comment in the middle of the story saying they want to get rid of hard disks. That, my friends, is Hollywood’s dream. The real culprit, the real cause of their economic problems isn’t the Internet, it isn’t the wires that connect computers. It’s the under-$100 terabyte hard drive. With a terabyte you can store hundreds of hours of movies and TV shows. That enables you to do your own programming.

To Hollywood, a perfect world would be one without hard disks.

To Apple, a perfect world is one where every moment a user is reading, listening or watching causes cash to flow back to Apple.

The fact is the Internet isn’t becoming more open or transparent. Instead it is becoming more about piling all our information into the databases of individual corporations. Instead it is becoming more about finding better and more targeted ways to market to us within those separate arenas of user generated content that is making fewer and fewer companies richer and richer.

What we are seeing is the massive consolidation of the web into a small number of digital robber barons.

And we shrug our shoulders and carry on feeding these monstrosities because we get service that just do the least possible in order to keep the natives quiet.