Why Be an Internet Optimist?

Kevin Donovan has a thoughtful post about “The Durable Internet.” He asks:

Now, there are examples of trickle down and mass rebellion. Tim does a nice job in “The Durable Net” of exploring these and does the most to bring me closer to faith in lay users. He cites the Digg rebellion against censorship and the fight for open IM protocols. But in my observation, very few non-technical folks use Adium or the other IM unifiers. In fact, iChat and AIM are dominant defaults. As for the Digg example, the users of Digg tend to be technically inclined and the cost of posting a hex code and pushing “Digg” are so minimal that, yes, even my mother could do it (though I doubt she would).

It is possible that the select few will be motivated enough to free their own iPhone or create tools to detect violations of the end-to-end principle, but I worry that the critical mass will not be reached. Although 40% of Saudis are disturbed by Internet censorship, I’d be willing to bet that 40% do not nor can they make use of Tor or Psiphon or the other anti-censorship technologies. These are the people who would suffer from a non-generative, non-neutral future if the technical few do not successfully defend their interests.

I’m mostly thinking out loud, so I’d love to hear your thoughts: are users capable of protecting their interests?

In my paper, I go into a lot of detail with specific examples in which open technologies persevered in the face of organized resistance. But let me step back and make a more general point about the underlying argument of that section of the paper: In a nutshell, we should be optimistic about the future of open platforms for the same reason we’re in favor of open platforms in the first place. Put simply, they work better. Open platforms harness the distributed knowledge of millions of people and produce ecosystems that is greater than the sum of their parts. Closed platforms are hampered by the limitations of central planning, and as a result they tend to be sterile, inflexible, and incapable of keeping up with developments on more open platforms.

Now, it often happens that in the early days of some technological competition, the advantages of open platforms will only be obvious to the most technically astute consumers. Indeed, the proprietary alternative may have advantages that look overwhelming to the lay customer. There were people in computer science departments in 1990 who understood why the Internet was better than Compuserve and AOL, but they would have had a hard time explaining it to the average AOL customer. Yet a decade later, you didn’t need to explain it. The gap had become so obvious that Compuserve and AOL’s own customers were clamoring for unfettered access to the real Internet.

This wasn’t some historical fluke, it was a predictable consequence of the Hayekian spontaneous order made possible by open technologies. And it’s far from the only example. Here’s another: I’m old enough to remember the pre-1.0 betas of Mozilla. In 2000, explaining to ordinary users why you’d be interested in Mozilla was pretty difficult. It was kind of slow and buggy, and it lagged behind Internet Explorer in the features most users understood. Now, Firefox is the dominant browser among Internet-savvy users, and it’s steadily eating away at IE’s market share. The advantages—security and a vast library of plug-ins—are much easier to explain to less-technical users, and they’re a direct consequence of what the most tech-savvy users saw way back in 2000, that the open source development model had key advantages over proprietary software.

Five years ago, I had a hard time explaining to people what DRM was and why I didn’t buy stuff from the iTunes store. Now, at least among people my age, the disadvantages of DRM are widely understood.

I could give lots of other examples. When a technologies is new, only the most perceptive users understand the long-term consequences of the technical decisions that underly open and closed platforms. But over time, the advantages of openness put wind at the backs of open technologies. Eventually, their advantages become obvious to everyone.

The same point applies to the network neutrality debate. In the short run, you may see only the most tech-savvy users actively resisting efforts to replace the open Internet with proprietary technologies. But they will have reality on their side. Don’t forget where the Internet came from in the first place. The Internet got some important research funding from the government during the early phases of its development, but these funds were explicitly not for commercial use. During the early 1990s, the Internet triumphed over a variety of alternative networks, networking protocols, and online services that collectively had vastly more money, market share, and hype. I’m not old enough to remember this, but a long-time Internet user has pointed out to me that there was a time when AOL was much bigger than the Internet, and AOL administrators would scold Internet users for inappropriate language in Usenet posts.

The open Internet now has a billion users, hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure investment, and billions of lines of code written for TCP/IP networks. If the Internet’s decentralized architecture was able to vanquish much larger, better-funded networks in the 1980s and 1990s, it strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that anyone is going to be able to displace it now that it’s got the power of network effects working in its favor.

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