Felten on the Technological “Cold War”

Ed Felten reports on his keynote at the SANE conference in the Netherlands:

The talk was a quick overview of what I used to think of as the copyfight, but I now think of as the technologyfight. The first part of the talk set the stage, using two technologies as illustrations: the VCR, and Sony-BMG’s recent copy-protected CDs. I then switched gears and talked about the political/regulatory side of the techfight.

In the last part of the talk, I analogized the techfight to the Cold War. I did this with some trepidation, as I didn’t want to imply that the techfight is just like the Cold War or that it is as important as the Cold War was. But I think that the Cold War analogy is useful in thinking about the techfight.

The analogy works best in suggesting a strategy for those on the openness/technology/innovation/end-to-end side of the techfight. In the talk, I used the Cold War analogy to suggest a three-part strategy.

He offers a three-prong strategy in the techfight. Prong 1 is containment: patiently but firmly resisting content industry efforts to gain ever more control over our technological devices. Prong 2 is explanation: Make sure that the public clearly understand what’s at stake. This is, I think, the most difficult task. I remember wandering around the University of Minnesota campus in 2001 with flyers explaining why it was a bad thing that Dmitry Sklyarov was in jail. I got mostly blank looks. Consumers benefit from open technologies, but most of them don’t really understand how they work or why they’re important. I think this job is gettig a little bit easier as DRM-related problems become more widespread, but the issue is still off the radar of virtually all voters.

I think his third prong is the most important, creation:

Ultimately the West won the Cold War because people could see that ordinary citizens in the West had better, more creative, more satisfying lives. Similarly, the best strategy in the techfight is simply to show what technology can do–how it can improve the lives of ordinary citizens. This will be the decisive factor.

In my talk at the Cato copyright conference, I talked about how the Internet clobbered AOL and CompuServe in the 1990s, despite the proprietary services’ substantial lead among ordinary consumers during the 1980s. I suspect the executives at those companies never really understood what hit them. No matter how hard they tried, their closed systems just couldn’t keep up with the open Internet’s exponential growth.

Eventually, the same thing will happen to the cramped sandboxes of proprietary media technologies. Today’s open media technologies are like the Internet of the 1980s: technologically elegant but lacking the critical mass required to offer a serious alternative for the average consumer. But like the Internet, we’re likely to see exponential growth of those technologies and content that works on them. The community of technologists, artists, of fans who use open platforms is pretty small now, but because of the inherent advantages of open architectures, its growth rate will be faster. As long as we can prevent Congress from doing something stupid like outlawing the general-purpose computer, the superior technology will win in the end.

SHARE: 2 comments