Over at TIME.com, I write about last week’s flap over Apple kicking out famed security researcher Charlie Miller out of its iOS developer program:

So let’s be clear: Apple did not ban Miller for exposing a security flaw, as many have suggested. He was kicked out for violating his agreement with Apple to respect the rules around the App Store walled garden. And that gets to the heart of what’s really at stake here–the fact that so many dislike the strict control Apple exercises over its platform. …

What we have to remember is that as strict as Apple may be, its approach is not just “not bad” for consumers, it’s creating more choice.

Read the whole thing here.

On numerous occasions here and elsewhere I have cited the enormous influence that Virginia Postrel’s 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies, has had on me.  Her “dynamist” versus “stasis” paradigm helps us frame and better understand almost all debates about technological progress. I cannot recommend that book highly enough.

In her latest Wall Street Journal column, Postrel considers what makes the iPad such a “magical” device and in doing so, she takes on the logical set forth in Jonathan Zittrain 2009 book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, although she doesn’t cite the book by name in her column. You will recall that in that book and his subsequent essays, Prof. Zittrain made Steve Jobs and his iPhone out to be the great enemy of digital innovation — at least as Zittrain defined it. How did Zittrain reach this astonishing conclusion and manage to turn Jobs into a pariah and his devices into the supposed enemy of innovation? It came down to “generativity,” Zittrain said, by which he meant technologies or networks that invite or allow tinkering and all sorts of creative uses. Zittrain worships general-purpose personal computers and the traditional “best efforts” Internet. By contrast, he decried “sterile, tethered” digital “appliances” like the iPhone, which he claimed limited generativity and innovation, mostly because of their generally closed architecture.

In her column, Postrel agrees that the iPad is every bit as closed as Zittrain feared iPhone successor devices would be. She notes: “customers haven’t the foggiest idea how the machine works. The iPad is completely opaque. It is a sealed box. You can’t see the circuitry or read the software code. You can’t even change the battery.” But Postrel continues on to explain why the hand-wringing about perfect openness is generally overblown and, indeed, more than a bit elitist:

A closed box offends geeks’ tinkering impulse, which demands swappable components and visible source code. But most of us aren’t looking to hack our own computers. In fact, the very characteristics that empower enthusiasts tend to frustrate and infantilize ordinary users, making them dependent on the occult knowledge of experts. The techies who so often dismiss Apple products as toys take understandable pride in their own knowledge. They go wrong in expecting everyone to share the same expertise.

It also comes down to specialization, she argues:

Even the “maker ethic” of do-it-yourself hobbyists depends on having the right ingredients and tools, from computers, lasers and video cameras to plywood, snaps and glue. Extraordinarily rare even among the most accomplished seamstresses, chefs and carpenters are those who spin their own fibers, thresh their own wheat or trim their own lumber—all once common skills. Rarer still is the Linux hacker who makes his own chips. Who among us can reproduce from scratch every component of a pencil or a pencil skirt? We don’t notice their magic—or the wonder of electricity or eyeglasses, anesthesia or aspirin—only because we’re used to them.

This is similar to the point I was making in my original review of Zittrain’s book when I asked:

Why can’t we all just get along? Isn’t it a sign of progress that we now have different models that appeal to different types of users? After all, those supposedly “sterile” applications like the iPhone and Tivo are loved by millions. Even calling them “sterile” seems a bit silly to me. After all, those devices have “fostered innovation and disruption” just like PCs and the Net have, just in a different way. Regardless, does Jonathan think all those people would really be better off if they were forced to fend for themselves with completely open iPhones and TiVos? Should the iPhone be shipped to market with no apps loaded on the main screen, forcing everyone to get them for on their own? Should TiVos have no interactive menus out-of-the-box, forcing you to go online and find some homebrew that someone whipped up to give you an open source guide in all its blocky ugliness?

And, like Postrel, I stressed that we have nothing to fear from the “mere mortals” who actually prefer “closed” digital “appliances” like the iPhone or iPad. Even if I generally side with Zittrain regarding which devices are best — the more “open” and tinkerable, the better — this should not be the standard for everyone else:

I fear that Jonathan has spent a little too much time in the ivory tower surrounded by countless people like me who are almost part cyborg in that they use so much technology that they are practically at one with their devices. (If I don’t have a laptop in my backpack and a mobile phone in my pocket I start to experience phantom pains, like I am missing appendages). If one finds themselves stuck in an echo chamber with enough of these other cyborg-humans, they can start to fear the consequences of what might happen when the mere mortals start walking in the front door and asking asinine questions about how to boot up their devices or log on to certain websites. But we have nothing to fear from these aliens. They can have their closed systems and we can have our open systems. We can tinker; they can just play with what they are given. We can be highly interactive cyber-goobers; they can be utterly passive couch potatoes. And so on.

Of course, there are many other reasons to question the Zittrain thesis and the other gloomy theories set forth by the group of scholars I have called “Openness Evangelicals.” As I pointed out in my recent book chapter making “The Case for Internet Optimism, Part 2 — Saving the Net from Its Supporters,” despite all the cyber-Chicken Little-ism coming out of the Ivory Tower these days about the supposed death of “openness,” the reality is that things have never been more open, innovative, or “generative” than they are right now.

Additional Reading:

• Review of Zittrain’s “Future of the Internet” (3/23/08)
• Zittrain’s Pessimistic Predictions and Problematic Prescriptions for the Net (7/20/09)
• On Defining Generativity, Openness, and Code Failure (9/9/10)
• The Internet, “Openness” & Commercialization (12/22/10)
• The Case for Internet Optimism, Part 2 – Saving the Net From Its Supporters (2/11/11)
• Code, Pessimism, and the Illusion of “Perfect Control” (5/8/09)
• “Cyber-Collectivism,” “Cyber-Progressivism,” or What? (2/14/11)

Pundits are foaming at the mouth about AT&T’s just-announced end to unlimited data packages for smartphones. Here is Jeff Jarvis calling the move “cynical,” “retrograde,” and “evil.” However, he provides no evidence that this is anything but AT&T facing economic reality. The iPhone was a revolution, and how much data people consume given an awesome device turned out to be much more than AT&T was ready for. Now they’re asking their customers who use the most data to pay more, and this is evil?

Not only is it not evil, it’s incredibly fair. Most people will probably pay less for service. The cheapest of AT&T’s new plans is $15 for 200 MB of data. That’s $15 cheaper than their current $30 for unlimited iPhone use. According to AT&T, 65 percent of their customers use less than 200 MB of data a month. I consider myself a heavy iPhone user, and I just came back from a trip to NYC on which my iPhone was the only device I took with me, and yet with 2 days left in my billing cycle, I’ve used 154 MB of data. So, AT&T’s change will actually be a price-cut for me and the majority of AT&T customers.

Yup, real evil.

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing lately about Google’s recent acquisitions of Teracent (ad-personalization) and AdMob (mobile ads), as well as Apple’s response, buying AdMob’s rival Quattro Wireless. Jeff Chester, true To form, quickly fired off an angry letter to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, ranting about how the Google/AdMob deal would harm consumer privacy with the same vague fulminations as ever:

Google amasses a goldmine of data by tracking consumers’ behavior as they use its search engine and other online services. Combining this information with information collected by AdMob would give Google a massive amount of consumer data to exploit for its benefit.

Yup, that’s right, it’s all part of Google’s grand conspiracy to exploit (and eventually enslave) us all—and Apple is just a latecomer to this dastardly game. It’s not as if that data about users’ likely interests might, oh, I don’t know… actually help make advertising more relevant—and thus increase advertising revenues for the mobile applications/websites that depend on advertising revenues to make their business models work. No, of course not! Greedy capitalist scum like Google and Apple don’t care about anyone but themselves, and just want to extract every last drop of “surplus value” (as Marx taught us) from The Worker. (Never mind that in 4Q2009 Google generated $1.47 billion for website owners who use Google AdSense to sell ads on their sites—up 17% over 4Q2008—or that Apple has a strong incentive to maximize revenues for its iPhone app developers.) Internet users of the world, unite!  You have nothing to lose but all those “free” content and services thrown at your feet!

Anyway, the letter lambastes AdMob’s current privacy policy, claiming that it “provides inadequate notice and little ability to opt out of its data collection and targets children 13 and over” and asserts that things are only going to get worse once Google takes over. By contrast, our far more reasonable friends at PrivacyChoice raise some very fair questions about Teracent’s current privacy policies, decrying “The worst consumer opt-out“—but unlike Chester, an anti-advertising zealot, the PrivacyChoice folks realize that, when big companies like Google and Apple buy small companies like AdMob, Teracent and Quattro Wireless, they face enormous pressure bring their new acquisitions privacy practices up to their own standards.  And where the new acquisitions are operating in a new area, like location-advertising, big players will likely decide on higher, not lower, privacy standards. As PrivacyChoice notes:

No doubt Google is working to assimilate Teracent into its own (much better) consumer privacy practices. But Teracent’s shortcomings provide a good reminder of the chasm in quality between the best and worst consumer privacy practices of ad-targeting companies. Until websites and advertisers start to attend to these matters in their own choices, this disparity in commitment to best practices will remain a central challenge to effective self-regulation.

Much as it annoys the Big-is-Bad crowd, consolidation can often reduce that that “privacy practice chasm” by raising the bar for all players. Google and Apple have spent years (in Apple’s case, decades) building trusted brands, which gives them a much stronger incentives to protect users’ privacy than a scrappy start-up under intense pressure from VCs to make their investment work—and quickly.

Why do (most) stores have walls? Because, obviously, walls are generally (at least in the developing world) a cost-effective technology for enforcing the value exchange that stores offer customers: products or services for customers’ cash. Open-air markets exist, but tend to be reserved for items cheap enough that the costs of theft fall below some “acceptable loss threshold.” All stores ultimately rely on employees and the police to chase down shoplifters.

Yet many valuable media products have long been simply given away by their producers in the implicit value exchange of advertising: newspapers, magazines, radio, television and online content/services for customers’ attention. It’s as if publishers set up a store with no walls and put up a big “steal this book!” sign inviting shoplifters in. Advertisers simply have to hope that their ads are interesting enough to catch the attention of readers/viewers/listeners—and, on the Web, maybe even get users to click on the ad! It should be obvious that the lack of any “enforcement technology” simply means that there will be less funding for this “free” stuff enjoyed by consumers—just as there would be fewer goods and/or higher prices if stores were prevented from discouraging or punishing shoplifting.

Ethicists could debate until the cows come home whether ad-blocking (or ad-ignoring) is morally tantamount to shoplifting—taking without “paying” (through attention)—but who cares? Whatever the morality of it, the important, and undeniable, thing is that those who ignore/block commercials are free-riding on the economic value created by those who don’t.

Enter Apple, which recently filed a patent application for a technology intended to ensure that users are seeing, and actually paying attention to, ads. Randall Stross, author of the excellent book Planet Google, hates the idea of “compelling attention” and suggests that it would so annoy consumers that it would cost Apple more in reputational capital than it’s worth. Stross may well be proven right in the marketplace (and, if so, fine), but does that make Apple’s proposal wrong? The brilliantly satirical “Secret Diary of Steve Jobs” calls the idea “evil,” and suggests that, in the pretended voice of Steve Jobs:

We don’t expect anyone will choose the ads. Because, for a very reasonable monthly fee, you’ll be able to eliminate all those ads and get your content free of all interruptions. How reasonable, you say? Well, let’s say that for $30 a month you could watch all the TV you wanted. Let’s say that we can get all the TV networks, or most of them anyway, on board for this. Let’s say that we give you not just this week’s shows but an enormous archive, one that ultimately includes every TV show ever made. Tear out the cable box, stop paying those assholes $100 or $200 a month, and go with us instead. Thus Apple now becomes the cable company. And the cable company dies. Yes, friends, another enormous, ridiculous, old-fashioned, greedy, fat, slow-moving, change-averse, stupid industry falls before the power of Steve. Or, as we call it, “Internet + Steve = you’re dead.” We did it to music retailers. Doing it now to mobile phone companies. Why not cable TV? These guys are ripe for a takedown.

It may well be true that and others will ultimately “disintermediate” existing cable companies, but that speculation misses the important point: It’s amazing that, despite the overwhelming success of advertising-supported business models on the Internet, even some of the cleverest commentators simply can’t fathom that some users would actually prefer to enter into a deal to get more stuff for free even if it meant dealing with the annoyance of “enforceable”/”compelled” advertising. Instead, Apple’s technology must be part of an evil plot to trick users into paying for content!

This is a classic seen/unseen problem: These critics see the annoyance of advertising (and resented bitterly) but they can’t see just how much value is created by empowering (yes, empowering) users to hold themselves to their promise to watch the ads that fund the content and services they get for free.

As I’ve noted, “sometimes we’re better off by being able to ‘bind’ our future selves—just as Ulysses asked his crew to tie him to his ship’s mast so he could enjoy the Siren’s enchanting song without giving in to their spell.” If users don’t have a way of proving that they’re paying attention, advertisers will have to discount the amount they pay publishers to account for uncertainty as to whether who is actually paying attention to ads—which means less free stuff for consumers. Similarly, if the digital rights management technology didn’t exist to ensure that movies downloaded from some online services could only be played for a certain number of days after download or first view (one day in the case of iTunes), consumers would actually be worse off because they would probably have to pay a price closer to the cost of downloading the movie to own forever (~$20 on iTunes) rather than being able to rent it for far less ($4-5). Ultimately, if advertising is to sustain media and culture, advertisers may have to make explicit the currently implicit quid pro quo attention-for-content/services: There is simply no moral reason that users who choose to block/ignore ads should be able to enjoy the fruits of everyone else’s attention/time/data. The only question is a practical one: whether it’s worthwhile for advertisers and publishers to invest in “enforcement” technologies like Apple’s.

regulation could short-circuit the eternal battle of technological one-upmanship between online advertisers and those users who rely on the technologies of evasion to “opt-out” of seeing ads or being tracked. Such privacy-conscious users are “free-riding” off of those users who don’t opt-out, since (at present) they generally don’t lose access to the free content and services supported by the targeted advertisements that other users do see. The user who blocks tracking, but not ads, is still free-riding off those users who don’t opt-out of tracking. On a large enough scale, such self-help has the potential to disrupt the value exchange of the Internet, just as automatic commercial-skipping has already disrupted the value exchange of television. As with all “Spy v. Spy” battles, this long-term trend is inevitable: As more sophisticated technologies of evasion are incorporated seamlessly into browsers and can be used without significantly degrading the browsing experience, their use will become increasingly mainstream. But ultimately, just as with television commercial-skipping, market forces can and will, if permitted, respond through technological means and the development of new business models. Today’s implicit quid pro quo may become, of necessity, explicit: Websites and ad networks will have to find increasingly creative ways to grant access to certain content and services for users who do not block ads or the tracking that makes ad space more valuable. Policymakers should take care not to ban such technologies or cripple such business models (e.g., through requiring opt-in), which may rely on more sophisticated forms of targeting such as the use of packet inspection data.

As users face an increasingly clear choice between (i) getting content and services for free supported by behavioral advertising and (ii) paying to receive those same services and content without tracking or even without ads altogether, policymakers will finally see whether users are really as bothered by profiling as the advocates of OBA regulation insist. Given the ongoing and widespread replacement of fee- or subscription-supported web business models with ad-supported models, it seems likely that the vast majority of consumers will continue to choose ad-supported models, including profiling.