On the podcast this week, Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, discusses identification systems. He talks about REAL ID, a national uniform ID law passed in 2005 that states have contested, and NSTIC, a more recent government proposal to create an online identification “ecosystem.” Harper discusses some of the hidden costs of establishing national identification systems and why doing so is not a proper role of government. He also comments on the reasoning behind national ID proposals and talks about practical, beneficial limits to transparency.
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Tomorrow at noon Facebook will be hosting one of its “Facebook DC Live” events featuring William Powers, author of Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life. I interviewed Powers on the Surprisingly Free podcast last year about his book.
What I like so much about Powers and his books is that he gracefully tackles what is no doubt a fact: that like all new technologies the Internet comes not just with benefits, but with costs as well. In the Internet’s case the costs that most folks have identified have to do with “what it’s doing to our brains” and attention spans. Unlike other authors on the same topic that I’ve read and interviewed, like Nick Carr, Jaron Lanier, Susan Maushart, and Elias Aboujaoude, Powers doesn’t overplay his concern or sound alarm bells of doom. Instead, he gives a very upbeat account of how great minds throughout history have dealt with technological change.
The punchline: be mindful of your action, and take a break once in a while. Wonderful advice wrapped in great stories and good philosophy; cyber-doom need not apply. So, check him out on the live stream tomorrow and you’ll be able to chat and ask questions.
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The Washington Post’s Cecilia Kang reports that the FTC will probe Apple for in-app purchases marketing practices. According to Kang,
FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz wrote in a letter to Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) that the practice of “in-app purchases” for certain applications on Apple iPhones, iPads and iPods raised concerns that consumers may not fully understand the ramifications of those charges. The Washington Post wrote about hefty charges amassed by children using Apple device games that public interest groups said should not be included in software geared for children. Some parents said their children didn’t understand the difference between real and pretend purchases for items such as $99 barrels of Smurfberries on the Capcom Interactive game Smurfs Village.
I’ll skip the question of whether it’s the proper role of the federal government to be a surrogate parent to children given iPhones by their real parents. Instead I’ll simply say that I don’t know how much easier we can expect Apple to make it for parents to supervise their children.
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Passwords All purchases on iOS devices require the user to enter a password before it can be completed. Don’t give your child the password and you don’t have to worry about charges.
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Allowances If you do want to allow your child to make purchases, but what to set some limits, Apple makes it easy to create an iTunes allowance account that allows a parent to specify an amount that is added to a child’s account each month. Once the child uses the amount, he can’t spend any more.
What more do we want Apple to do?
On this week’s podcast, Elias Aboujaoude, a psychiatrist and author based at Stanford University, discusses his new book, Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality. Aboujaoude says that the internet has positive effects, but he’s worried that most of our day-to-day online activities are negatively affecting us. He explains how, in his view, behaviors like compulsive online shopping and angry commenting on blogs is seeping into our offline lives, with profound negative effects. He also talks about why he thinks the internet is different from previous technologies that caused techno-fear, why he thinks it’s often difficult for online norms to develop, and what he thinks proper roles are for medicine, psychiatry, and government in the online sphere.
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There has been much hand wringing about Apple’s new in-app subscription system for publishers and even one report that antitrust enforcers have begun looking into the matter.
The purpose of the antitrust laws is to protect consumers, not companies, so the simple fact that Apple will take a 30% cut from publishers who want to offer subscriptions on iOS devices should not be enough to trigger scrutiny. So, my guess at what a theory of consumer harm against Apple might be is this: Apple not only takes a 30% cut of any subscription purchased in-app on an iOS device, it also requires publishers to offer as low a price on iOS as they offer anywhere else. Therefore, a case could be made that a publisher faced with Apple’s 30% fee (and unable to simply raise prices by 30% just on Apple’s devices) might raise prices on all platforms enough to cover Apple’s cut. So, assuming market power of course, Apple’s new policy could affect all digital subscription pricing.
Yet it’s hard to talk about market power in such a nascent sector. Digital subscriptions didn’t exist 5 years ago, and they do now in large part thanks to Apple. The right market structure is sorting itself out right now and yes, Apple does seem to have a well-earned lead as the innovator in the space. But if the original Mac taught us anything, is that a lead in a nascent sector is no guarantee of monopoly and regulators would be creating serious disincentives to innovation if they meddle.
Digital publishing is very much a contestable market. I hardly need to point out that the day after Apple’s announcement, Google made public its own very competitive subscription service. And while the iPad is ahead of the game right now, Android tablets are only now beginning to hit the market. If declining iPhone market share is any indication, Android will nip at Apple’s heels in the tablet space as well. And let’s not forget other formidable (and somewhat-formidable) competitors in the likes of HP’s WebOS, Microsoft-Nokia, and RIM.
Moreover, while the consumer harm is speculative, the potential consumer benefits of Apple’s subscription service are pretty clear:
- Ease of Use & Security: Apple’s app store is a tremendous innovation if nothing else because it creates a simple payment system consumers trust. iPad users will tell you they much prefer one-click subscriptions managed through Apple than having to create many accounts with disparate publishers, which incidentally improves security.
- Privacy: One thing that sets Google’s offering apart from Apple’s is that they will share with publishers information about subscribers. Apple, on the other hand, gives users the choice of sharing information with publishers, and then it’s only limited information. This should please privacy conscious consumers.
- Subsidized Devices: As a recently viral article in Wired suggests, the reason Apple is able to offer the iPad entry price of $500 (which rivals are having a hard time meeting) is that Apple is a vertically integrated company. This means that the 30% from subscriptions potentially subsidizes the iPad’s low price, thus benefitting consumers.
My last post on the opportunities presented by “The Great Stagnation” got a bit of attention, and I’m heartened by that because I’d like to develop my conception of “opting out” a bit more in later posts. Today I’d just like to respond to my friend and Colleague Tate Watkins who reacted to my post noting that “most people don’t want any more leisure. People don’t work 20 hours a week because they would have to make up the difference ‘playing with [their] families and reading books.'”
Tate says that spending that much time doing nothing, and doing it with their families, is likely a net minus for most people. I think he’s absolutely right, so I guess I need to define what I mean by “leisure” when I say that “the cost of leisure is going down” allowing us to consume more of it.
Continue reading →
In his column on Monday, David Brooks put his finger on what I found most interesting about Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation. Namely:
It could be that in an industrial economy people develop a materialist mind-set and believe that improving their income is the same thing as improving their quality of life. But in an affluent information-driven world, people embrace the postmaterialist mind-set. They realize they can improve their quality of life without actually producing more wealth.
As Tyler points out in this book, and catalogued at length in his other excellent book, Create Your Own Economy, recent increases in happiness come from growth in internal economies. That is, internal to humans. In the past, increased well-being came from not having a toilet and then having one, or the invention of cheap air travel. Today they come from blogging, watching Lost on Netflix, listening to a symphony from iTunes, tweeting with your friends, seeing their pictures on Facebook or Path, and learning and collaborating on Wikipedia. As a result, once one secures a certain income to cover basic needs, greater happiness and well-being can be had for virtually nothing.
The problem some see with this is that the Internet sector, while it may give us amazing innovations, produces little by way of revenue or jobs. Brooks also laments that because American’s have not come to grips with this growing distinction between wealth and standard of living, we tend to live beyond our means, which is certainly true in a personal and public fiscal sense.
But I’d like to see this seeming decoupling of wealth and well-being as an opportunity.
Continue reading →
Speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said he wants the service to become as ubiquitous and simple as tap water. But he should be careful what he wishes for.
Search Engine Land is already asking, “Twitter As Utility, Like Running Water?” The thing about water is that it tends to be an indispensable natural monopoly, and therefore regulated. Twitter today controls access to its “firehose” of tweet data, but access to utilities like water is mandated open and prices are set by regulators.
As I discussed recently on the podcast with Danny Sullivan, some have already suggested Google should be treated like a utility and brought under a regime of “search neutrality.” Harvard’s danah boyd has been banging the “regulate Facebook as a utility” drum for quite some time. And Just today Wharton’s Kevin Werbach put out a draft of his new law review article: “The Network Utility.”
Of course, as I already mentioned, it’s unsurmountable monopolies that should be regulated, and it would be a stretch to say that either Facebook or Twitter qualify. But I fear we’ll be hearing more and more of this “utility” language in the near future.
On this week’s podcast, Jaron Lanier, pioneering computer scientist, musician, visual artist, and author, discusses his book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. Lanier discusses effects of the web becoming “regularized” and dangers he sees with “hive mind” production, which he claims leads to “crummy design.” He also explains why he thinks advertising is a misnomer, contending that modern advertising is more about access to potential consumers than expressive or creative form. Lanier also advocates for more peer-to-peer rather than hub-and-spoke transactions, discusses why he’s worried about the disappearance of the middle class, claims that “free” isn’t really free, talks about libertarian ideals, and explains why he’s ultimately hopeful about the future.
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On the podcast this week, Susan Maushart, a columnist, author and social commentator, discusses her new book, The Winter of our Disconnect. Maushart talks about her experience unplugging herself, and her three teenagers, from most screen-based technologies for 6 months. She discusses how she got her kids to go along with the plan, how she found support in Thoreau’s Walden, what boredom is, and whether she found balance through the experience. Maushart also talks about limits to allowing your children the luxury of choice, commenting on Amy Chua’s Tiger Mother philosophy.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.