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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Walled garden

Meaning

Noun