I suppose you could argue that a 37-year-old father of two shouldn’t still be playing video games, but I love ’em and just can’t give them up. I’ll probably still be playing when I’m 80 inside a virtual holodeck down in some lame Florida retirement community. (God I hope my Golden Years are that exciting).
These days, I just don’t have the time to play the more sophisticated action & adventure games that I used to love the most, so I now spend most of my time with “single-session” games, especially sports games that allow me to play a quick game and then put it aside for awhile. Last night, while I was sitting in my basement with my kids playing an intense Michigan vs. Ohio State matchup on EA’s marvelous new “NCAA Football 2007,” my mind started drifting back to all the other football games I’ve played through the years on multiple platforms. In particular, I remembered the very first sports game I ever bought was “Atari Football” back in the late 1970s. At the time, I thought it was about the most cutting-edge thing ever invented. Today, of course, it looks absolutely primitive. Just look at this! …
… And then look at this beautiful screen shot from the new NCAA Football game…
We’ve come a long way in a very short time!
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Corey Doctorow has a good article on the DMCA on Information Week:
The DMCA makes the kind of reverse-engineering that’s commonplace in most industries illegal in copyright works. For example, in the software industry, it’s legal to reverse-engineering a file-format in order to make a competing product. The reason: The government and the courts created copyright to provide an incentive to creativity, not to create opportunities to exclude competitors from the marketplace.
Reverse engineering is a common practice in most industries. You can reverse-engineer a blender and make your own blades, you can reverse-engineer a car and make your own muffler, and you can reverse-engineer a document and make a compatible reader. Apple loves to reverse-engineer–from Keynote to TextEdit to Mail.app, Apple loves reverse-engineering its competitors’ products and making its own competing products.
But the iTunes/iPod product line is off-limits to this kind of reverse-engineering. No one but Apple can authorize an iTunes/iPod competitor, and Apple’s not exactly enthusiastic about such authorization –the one major effort to date was the stillborn Motorola ROKR phone, which was so crippled by ridiculous Apple-driven restrictions that it barely made a ripple as it sank to the bottom of the cesspool of failed electronics.
Doctorow makes a good point about Apple’s own reverse engineering. I wonder if Apple believes it was guilty of adopting “the tactics and ethics of a hacker” when it reverse engineered Power Point in order to allow Keynote users to interoperate with Power Point users. Or for that matter, when they bundled Samba, a networking suite that was built by reverse-engineering Microsoft’s file and print sharing protocols, into Mac OS X. Maybe those products ought to be illegal as well.
Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Friendster has been granted a patent on social networking software. (Not surprisingly, Techdirt beat the Journal by three weeks) The patent in question is # 7,069,308, “System, method and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks.” Here’s a sample from the “BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION”:
An invitation system allows users to invite friends or acquaintances to join the system. Invitations may be sent, for example, by e-mail. The invited friend or acquaintance may accept the invitation, and then become a user of the system, as a `friend` of the inviting user. The new user is prompted to provide descriptive data and the relationship data for friends or acquaintances who they would like to join the system. It is a unique and important feature of the invention that the invitation system (as well as related communication systems within the invention) allows two users to confirm that they are “friends”, and therefore become designated as such in the system.
Users in the system further have the ability to provide information about one another. For example, one user might write a positive comment about a second user’s personality. In one implementation, the second user may accept or reject display of the comment. Further, in this implementation, any other users who are connected to the second user through any number of acquaintance pathways may see the comment as part of the “descriptive data” about the second user.
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It appears that the US government is tip toeing toward reliquishing control of the Internet, and The Register explains in a long and intersting article. I thought these comments were particularly interesting:
It was apparent from the carefully selected panel and audience members that the internet – despite its global reach – remains an English-speaking possession. Not one of the 11 panel members, nor any of the 22 people that spoke during the meeting, had anything but English as their first language.
While talk centered on the future of the internet and its tremendous global influence, the people that sat there discussing it represented only a tiny minority of those that now use the internet every day. Reflections on the difficulty of expanding the current internet governance mechanisms to encompass the global audience inadvertently highlighted the very parochialism of those that currently form the ICANN in-crowd.
When historians come to review events in Washington on 26 July 2006, they will no doubt be reminded of discussions in previous centuries over why individual citizens should be given a vote. Or, perhaps, why landowners or the educated classes shouldn’t be given more votes than the masses.
On some level, this is obviously right. The Internet is now used by a great many non-Americans, and it’s understandable that they’d like some input into ICANN’s decisions. But I think the “democratic” frame for thinking about the issue is somewhat wrongheaded. The Internet is not a democratic country, and ICANN isn’t its government.
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To wrap this series up, let me recap the reasons that platform monopolies are a bad idea:
Advocates of platform monopoly rights argue that such rights increase the profitability of new platform creation, thereby encouraging more R&D spending and innovation.
Technological systems are subject to “gains to interoperability,” analogous to the gains from trade.
Firms have an incentive to engage in “platform protectionism,” which reduces the surplus created by network effects but can increase the share of that surplus captured by the firm.
Often, very little of the value of a platform can be explained by the design decisions of the firm that created it.
A platform owner will tend to under-license its platform due to the inability of intermediaries to capture the full value created by the platform. This problem gets worse as the number of intermediaries increases, inefficiently “flattening” the development structure.
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I got a first-hand lesson in the pace of technological change when I was writing my paper on the DMCA. I wrote the first draft last July, went through Cato’s editing process from October to January, and then the paper was released in March.
Between the initial writing of the paper and its publication 9 months later, the online video marketplace underwent a revolution. When I was writing last July, I described the market for streaming video as stagnant, dominated by three mutually incompatible, vertically integrated video platforms controlled by Apple, Microsoft, and Real, respectively. By press time, YouTube had burst onto the scene.
The remarkable thing about YouTube is that from a technical perspective, there’s nothing especially remarkable about it. Instead of inventing their own video streaming format, as Apple, Microsoft, and Real had done, they built a video player atop Adobe’s popular Flash technology. Flash was originally designed as a platform for lightweight web animations, but it has evolved into a full-featured application platform. Luckily for YouTube, Flash was already installed on the vast majority of PCs and Macs, meaning that YouTube didn’t have to go to the trouble of getting its software installed on millions of PCs.
Here, I would argue, is an example of a case where we had at too many video platforms that tried to do too much. Had Microsoft, Apple, and Real been able to agree on a unified video format, and allowed other third parties to develop for that format, it’s likely that streaming video would have taken off much earlier. But because each company was more focused on making sure its format prevailed than on ensuring consumers had the best possible video experience, the streaming video market stayed in a kind of stalemate for close to a decade.
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Don’t look now, but your VoIP service may be getting worse. According to a report released this week by Brix Networks, an Internet monitoring firm, VoIP quality measurably declined in the past 18 months. Specifically, it found that 20 percent of VoIP calls had “unacceptable” quality, as opposed to 15 percent a year and a half ago. (The data was gathered from testyourvoip.com, a web site operated by Brix).
The chief tech offier of Brix, Kaydam Heydarat, says the decline is the result of VoIP having to compete for resources on an increasingly crowded web. If that sounds familar, it should–opponents of mandated net neutrality have long argued that congestion could hurt time-sensitive applications such as VoIP if network owners aren’t allowed to prioritize traffic. As Mr. Heydarat says: The network is ready for VoIP… But now that there are more services running over the same pipe, carriers need to differentiate packets and prioritize service.”
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Well, here we go again. Not satisfied with the prospect of merely regulating the broadcast television and radio airwaves, Congress is poised to again introduce legislation that would extend indecency regulations to cable and satellite television. Broadcasting & Cable magazine reports today that Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.) and Tom Osborne (R-Neb.) are introducing a bill, “The Family Choice Act of 2006,” that would try to control cable content by giving the industry a choice among three regulatory approaches.
The bill would require multichannel video providers to choose one of three options:
1) apply FCC broadcast indecency standards to their own programming;
2) offer channels a la carte so subscribers could choose not to take certain channels; or
3) offer a family-friendly tier that meets the definition supplied in the bill.
Wow, now how’s that for a devil’s choice! But cable or satellite providers shouldn’t be forced to pick among these poisons because government has absolutely no rational legal or philosophical basis for imposing censorship on pay-TV providers. As I noted last June in a Washington Post editorial:
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David Berlind elaborates on the sticky situation “Plays for Sure” vendors will find themselves in if Microsoft launches a device that isn’t Plays for Sure compliant:
Short term, Microsoft will have something by the holidays that, from a specification point of view, compares tit-for-tat with one or two devices. But Sasse as well as his contemporaries are in denial if they think this isn’t going to impact their business over the long run. Microsoft, of course, has to do whatever it thinks it must do to keep Apple from eating its lunch in the world of multimedia entertainment which is what Apple is doing, at least on some fronts). On the other hand, this is exactly the sort of risk that companies licensing such foundational technologies (as DRM) take when those technologies are proprietary and why, if at all possible, it makes sense to hedge that risk with product R&D around something more open. If I were Sasse, right about now, I’d be picking up the phone and calling Sun to find out more about the Open Media Commons and Project DReaM. It may not be perfect. But at some point, businesses and users need to get a better handle on how much of their strategies, budgets, and their investments in technologies (eg:users buying music) they’re willing to subject to decision making processes over which they have no control (eg: those of the vendors of certain proprietary technologies).
There’s a cruel irony here. I’ve always thought the “plays for sure” label was cynical, given that it prevented consumers from playing their music on the world’s most popular MP3 player. But here we see DRM potentially screwing over not just users, but also companies that foolishly deployed DRM technology controlled by a potential competitor.
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One of the most frequently asked questions in the net neutrality debate has been why big Internet companies like Google and Microsoft support regulation so strongly. If, as they say, an unregulated market would squeeze out the little guy, you’d think these big companies would be dead set against regulation. And if opponents are right, regulation would make the Internet on which these companies depend much less efficient.
This should make more than a few shareholders of these companies nervous. So much so that one group–the Free Enterprise Action Fund–wants a shareholder vote to require Microsoft to prepare a report on its stance toward this regulation.
The Fund, it should be noted, is not a neutral observer. It is a mutual fund specifically geared toward “investment and advocacy to promote the American system of free enterprise.” But it raises a reasonable point. “We feel they should be worried about innovation and competition rather than perhaps running to the government for regulation,” says Tom Borelli of the Fund. ” “If they have thought this through and they know what they’re doing, what’s wrong with a report to your shareholders explaining your rationale?” he asks.
Good points. Of course, the proposed shareholder vote will probably not take place–corporation law provides plenty of ways to avoid such embarrassing things. Still, it would be interesting to see such a vote, and if Microsoft shareholders think regulation is in their best interest.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.