walled garden

plural walled gardens

1. A garden enclosed by walls for purposes of shelter or decoration.

   The walled garden full of shadows blazed with colour as if the flowers were giving up the light absorbed during the day.

   1912, Joseph Conrad, chapter IV, in A Smile of Fortune

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   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.

   2016 January 16, Sarah Howe, “The Saturday poem: The Walled Garden”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

2. Any closed platform. A closed platform is any computing system where the manufacturer retains monopolistic control over installation, distribution, and use of software and services.

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   A ‘walled garden’, in this case, refers to a closed platform, where the provider maintains restrictive control over what is hosted on the platform, and in many cases how that content is accessed, paid for, and even supported by different services and technologies. In many cases, walled gardens also lock players to the platform, blocking or limiting the likes of cross-play, cross-progression, and other cross-platform approaches.

   Alexander Bergendahl, Will Freeman (23 June 2026 (last accessed)), “Opening Up: The Future of Game Platforms”, in Look Locker Blog

3. figurativelyengineeringA closed platform for content or services controlled by a single carrier or service provider, typically requiring subscription to access.

   AOL tried to provide a walled garden for all their subscribers in the early 1990s.

   2007, Wes Simpson, Howard Greenfield, IPTV and Internet video, →ISBN, page 39

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   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.

   2000 September 4, “AOL's 'Walled Garden'”, in Wall Street Journal

   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.

   2016, Woody Leonhard, Windows 10 All-In-One For Dummies, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 885

   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.

   2017, Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, Atlantic Books, →ISBN

   The content sludge is also present in Big Tech’s plans to reimagine search as an interactive, chatbot-powered walled garden.

   2023 May 17, Charlie Warzel, “Here’s How AI Will Come for Your Job”, in The Atlantic

4. InternetA 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.

   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.

   2007, Michael A. Banks, Blogging Heroes, →ISBN, page 52