So, do I need to remind everyone of my ongoing rants about Jonathan Zittrain’s misguided theory about the death of digital generativity because of the supposed rise of “sterile, tethered” devices? I hope not, because even I am getting sick of hearing myself talk about it. But here again anyway is the obligatory listing of all my tirades: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 + video and my 2-part debate with Lessig and him last year.
You will recall that the central villain in Zittrain’s drama The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It is big bad Steve Jobs and his wicked little iPhone. And then, more recently, Jonathan has fretted over those supposed fiends at Facebook. Zittrain’s worries that “we can get locked into these platforms” and that “markets [will] coalesce [around] these tamer gated communities,” making it easier for both corporations and governments to control us. More generally, Zittrain just doesn’t seem to like that some people don’t always opt for the same wide open general purpose PC experience that he exalts as the ideal. As I noted in my original review of his book, Jonathan doesn’t seem to appreciate that it may be perfectly rational for some people to seek stability and security in digital devices and their networking experiences—even if they find those solutions in the form of “tethered appliances” or “sterile” networks, to use his parlance.
Every once and awhile I find a sharp piece by someone out there who is willing to admit that they see nothing wrong with such “closed” platforms or devices, or they even argue that those approaches can be superior to the more “open” devices and platforms out there. That’s the case with this Harry McCracken rant over at Technologizer today with the entertaining title, “The Verizon Droid is a Loaf of Day-Old Bread.” McCracken goes really hard on the Droid — which hurts because I own one! — and I’m not sure I entirely agree with his complaint about it, but what’s striking is how it represents the antithesis of Zittrainianism: Continue reading →
Harvard Berkman Center professor Jonathan Zittrain has published another pessimistic, Steve-Jobs-is-Taking-Us-Straight-To-Cyber-Hell editorial building on the gloomy thesis he set forth in his 2008 book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. His latest piece appears in the Financial Times and it’s entitled, “A Fight over Freedom at Apple’s Core. Concerning the recent Apple iPad announcement, Zittrain warns: “Mr Jobs ushered in the personal computer era and now he is trying to usher it out.”
I’m not going to go into yet another lengthy dissertation about what it so misguided about his thesis that cyberspace is becoming more “regulable” and that digital “generativity” is dying because of the rise of devices like the iPhone & iPad, or sites like Facebook. Instead, I will just point you to the many things I’ve written before explaining just how far off the mark Prof. Zittrain is on this point. [See the complete list down below + video of our debate.]
But let me just say this… Ignoring that fact that he is an iPhone user himself — which makes no sense considering that he thinks of Apple as the font of all cyber-evil — he can’t muster any substantive empirical evidence proving that the Net and digital devices are being more “closed, sterile, and tethered,” as he repeatedly claims in his book and editorials. And that’s not surprising because the reality is that the digital world is more open and generative than ever, and even if there are some “closed” devices and systems out there, they are actually quite innovative and not perfectly closed as Zittrain suggests. The spectrum of “open vs. closed” systems and devices is incredible diverse and nothing is perfectly “open” or “closed.” We can have the best of both worlds: many open systems with some partial “walled gardens” here and there (or hybrid systems combining both). Regardless, we are witnessing greater digital “generativity” and innovation with each passing year. Until Zittrain can prove the opposite, his thesis must be considered a failure.
Finally, I want to associate myself with this excellent critique of the Zittrain thesis by Prof. Ed Felten, who points out that Zittrain’s argument doesn’t even work for the iPad, which I would agree is a fairly “closed appliance” in the Zittrainian scheme of the things:
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Despite my frequent disagreements with his policy conclusions, Farhad Manjooo of Slate is one of the most gifted tech policy pundits around today and everything he writes is worth reading (and I whole-heartedly agreed with his recent article on the high-tech and antitrust). Alas, I find myself again disagreeing with him again today.
In his latest column, “The Great iPhone Lockdown: Should the FCC force Apple to sell Google’s apps?” Manjoo responds to a recent essay by TLF contributor Ryan Radia (“Newsflash to FCC: The iPhone is a Closed Platform, and Consumers Love It“). In that essay, Ryan generally argued that: (a) a lot of people own and love the iPhone despite some silly restrictions on certain apps; and (b) if they don’t like that, there are plenty of other options from which they can choose. Consequently, regulation seems unwarranted and likely highly misguided in light of the potential unitended consequences in might yield. It’s an argument I very much agree with, of course. Anyway, Manjoo responds:
Radia’s argument isn’t crazy. Just the other day, I argued that the government shouldn’t go after Google for antitrust violations because the tech industry is fluid; companies that are on top today can fall tomorrow. So what if Apple rejects apps capriciously? If its actions are so terrible, consumers will eventually abandon it.
But then Manjoo counters that argument and goes completely off-the-rails with several assertions that I find quite perplexing: Continue reading →
Over at the Verizon Policy Blog, Link Hoewing has a sharp piece up entitled, “Of Business Models and Innovation.” He makes a point that I have often stressed in my debates with Zittrain and Lessig, namely, that the whole “open vs. closed” debate is typically greatly overstated or misunderstood. Hoewing correctly argues that:
The point is not that open or managed models are always better or worse. The point is that there is no one “right” model for promoting innovation. There are examples of managed and open business models that have been both good for innovation and bad for it. There are also examples of managed and open models that have both succeeded and failed. The point is in a competitive market to let companies develop business models they believe will serve consumers best and see how things play out.
Exactly right. Moreover, the really important point here is that there exists a diverse spectrum of innovative digital alternatives from which to choose. Along the “open vs. closed” spectrum, the range of digital technologies and business models continues to grow and grow in both directions. Do you want wide-open, tinker-friendly devices, sites, or software? You got it. Do you want a more closed, simple, and safe online experience? You can have that, too. And there are plenty of choices in between.
This is called progress!
What would it take to create a more secure Internet? That’s what John Markoff explores in his latest New York Times article, “Do We Need a New Internet?” Echoing some of the same fears Jonathan Zittrain articulates in his new book The Future of the Internet, Markoff wonders if online viruses and other forms of malware have gotten so out-of-control that extreme measures may be necessary to save the Net. Compared to when cyber-security attacks first started growing over 20 years ago, Markoff argues that:
[T]hings have gotten much, much worse. Bad enough that there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.
Like many others, Markoff fingers anonymity as one potential culprit:
The Internet’s current design virtually guarantees anonymity to its users. (As a New Yorker cartoon noted some years ago, “On the Internet, nobody knows that you’re a dog.”) But that anonymity is now the most vexing challenge for law enforcement. An Internet attacker can route a connection through many countries to hide his location, which may be from an account in an Internet cafe purchased with a stolen credit card. “As soon as you start dealing with the public Internet, the whole notion of trust becomes a quagmire,” said Stefan Savage, an expert on computer security at the University of California, San Diego.
Consequently, Markoff suggests that:
A more secure network is one that would almost certainly offer less anonymity and privacy. That is likely to be the great tradeoff for the designers of the next Internet. One idea, for example, would be to require the equivalent of drivers’ licenses to permit someone to connect to a public computer network. But that runs against the deeply held libertarian ethos of the Internet.
Indeed, not only does it run counter to the ethos of the Net, but as Markoff rightly notes, “Proving identity is likely to remain remarkably difficult in a world where it is trivial to take over someone’s computer from half a world away and operate it as your own. As long as that remains true, building a completely trustable system will remain virtually impossible.” I’ve spent a lot of time writing about that fact here and won’t belabor the point other than to say that efforts to eliminate anonymity for the entire Internet would prove extraordinarily intrusive and destructive — of both the Internet’s current architecture and the rights of its users. There’s just something about a “show-us-you-papers,” national ID card-esque system of online identification that creeps most of us out. That’s why I spend so much time fighting age verification mandates for social networking sites and other websites; it’s the first step down a very dangerous road.
But what if we could apply such solutions in a narrower sense? That is, could we create more secure communities within the overarching Internet superstructure that might provide greater security? Markoff starts thinking along those lines when he suggests…
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I’ve been hammering Jonathan Zittrain pretty hard here over the past year for the thesis he sets forth in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It that digital “generativity” is at risk today. The reason I have been doing so is because all signs point in the exact opposite direction, and more so with each passing day. Contrary to Jonathan’s fear that the Internet and digital technologies are growing more closed, tethered, and sterile, I have argued that the facts on the ground show us how the world is actually becoming far more open, untethered, and innovative. And that’s true even for the technology that Jonathan singles out in the book for special scorn — the iPhone.
Consider David Pogue’s post today on the New York Times‘ technology blog today entitled “So Many iPhone Apps, So Little Time.” Pogue reports that:
there are now 15,000 programs available on the App Store, and so many more are flooding in that Apple’s army of screeners can’t even keep up. I keep meaning to write a thoughtful, thorough roundup of the very best of these amazing programs, but every day that I don’t do it, the job becomes more daunting.
[...]
Apple, which runs the store, keeps 30 percent of each sale. Even so, Ocarina [an application Pogue discusses in his essay] demonstrates that a programmer can make a staggering amount of money from the iPhone store. It’s a crazy new software model that I don’t remember seeing anywhere else. It’s not a boxed software program for $600, or even a shareware program you download for $25. It’s a buck a copy.
The beauty here is that at these prices, there’s very little risk in trying something out. How many software programs have you bought for your Mac or PC? Two? Four? Well, the average iPhone owner may wind up installing 10, 20 or 30 programs. In all, according to Apple, iPhone owners have downloaded 500 million copies of these programs. Half a billion–since last July.
There’s a lot of gloom in the tech industry (and every industry, for that matter). But even when the economy is crashing down around us, there’s still amazing power in a single good idea. And the one on display here–pricing software so low that millions of people buy it without batting an eye–is turning a few clever programmers into millionaires.
I ask you: Does this sound like a world that is growing less generative, as Zittrain argues? Because it sure doesn’t sound like it to me. Moreover, if you still don’t think the iPhone is open enough, then there’s always a simple solution to that: just buy another phone!
“Hasn’t Steve Jobs learned anything in the last 30 years?” asks Farhad Manjoo of Slate in an interesting piece about “The Cell Phone Wars” currently raging between Apple’s iPhone and the Google’s new G1, Android-based phone. Manjoo wonders if whether Steve Jobs remembers what happen the last time he closed up a platform: “because Apple closed its platform, it was IBM, Dell, HP, and especially Microsoft that reaped the benefits of Apple’s innovations.” Thus, if Jobs didn’t learn his lesson, will he now with the iPhone? Manjoo continues:
Well, maybe he has—and maybe he’s betting that these days, “openness” is overrated. For one thing, an open platform is much more technically complex than a closed one. Your Windows computer crashes more often than your Mac computer because—among many other reasons—Windows has to accommodate a wider variety of hardware. Dell’s machines use different hard drives and graphics cards and memory chips than Gateway’s, and they’re both different from Lenovo’s. The Mac OS, meanwhile, has to work on just a small range of Apple’s rigorously tested internal components—which is part of the reason it can run so smoothly. And why is your PC glutted with viruses and spyware? The same openness that makes a platform attractive to legitimate developers makes it a target for illegitimate ones.
I discussed these issues in greater detail in my essay on”Apple, Openness, and the Zittrain Thesis” and in a follow-up essay about how the Apple iPhone 2.0 was cracked in mere hours. My point in these and other essays is that the whole “open vs. closed” dichotomy is greatly overplayed. Each has its benefits and drawbacks, but there is no reason we need to make a false choice between the two for the sake of “the future of the Net” or anything like that.
In fact, the hybrid world we live in — full of a wide variety of open and proprietary platforms, networks, and solutions — presents us with the best of all worlds. As I argued in my original review of Jonathan Zittrain’s book, “Hybrid solutions often make a great deal of sense. They offer creative opportunities within certain confines in an attempt to balance openness and stability.” It’s a sign of great progress that we now have different open vs. closed models that appeal to different types of users. It’s a false choice to imagine that we need to choose between these various models.
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Sorry if it seems like I am beating a dead horse here, but the folks at the City Journal asked me a pen a review of Jonathan Zittrain’s new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Faithful readers here will no doubt remember that I have already penned a review of the book and several follow-up essays. (Part 1, 2, 3, 4). I swear I am not picking on Jonathan, but his book is probably the most important technology policy book of the year–Nick Carr’s Big Switch would be a close second–and deserves attention. Specifically, I think it deserves attention because I believe that Jonathan’s provocative thesis is wildly out of touch with reality. As I state in the City Journal review of his book:
[C]ontrary to what Zittrain would have us believe, reports of the Internet’s death have been greatly exaggerated. [...] Not only is the Net not dying, but there are signs that digital generativity and online openness are thriving as never before. [...]
Essentially, Zittrain creates a false choice regarding the digital future we face. He doesn’t seem to believe that a hybrid future is possible or desirable. In reality, however, we can have a world full of some tethered appliances or even semi-closed networks that also includes generative gadgets and open networks. After all, millions of us love our iPhones and TiVos, but we also take full advantage of the countless other open networks and devices at our disposal. [...]
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