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Zittrain’s Pessimistic Predictions and Problematic Prescriptions for the Net

by on July 20, 2009 · 22 comments

Well, here we go again. Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain has penned another gloomy essay about how “freedom is at risk in the cloud” and the future of the Internet is in peril because nefarious digital schemers like Apple, Facebook, and Google are supposedly out to lock you into their services and take away your digital rights.  And so, as I have done here many times before (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 + video!), I will offer a response arguing that Jonathan’s cyber-Chicken Little-ism is largely unwarranted.

Zittrain’s latest piece is entitled “Lost in the Cloud” and it appears in today’s New York Times.  It closely tracks the arguments he has set forth in his book The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It, which I named the most important technology policy book of 2008, but not because I agreed with its central thesis.  Zittrain’s book and his new NYT essay are the ultimate exposition of Lessigite technological pessimism.  I don’t know what they put in the water up at the Berkman Center to make these guys so remarkably cranky and despondent about the future of of the Internet, but starting with Lawrence Lessig’s Code in 1999 and running through to Zittrain’s Future of the Internet we have been forced to endure endless Tales of the Coming Techno-Apocalypse from these guys.  Back in the late 90s, Prof. Lessig warned us that AOL and some other companies would soon take over the new digital frontier since “Left to itself, cyberspace will become a perfect tool of control.”  Ah yes, how was it that we threw off the chains of our techno-oppressors and freed ourselves from that wicked walled garden hell?  Oh yeah, we clicked our mouses and left! And that was pretty much the end of AOL’s “perfect control” fantasies. [See my recent debate with Prof. Lessig over at Cato Unbound for more about this “illusion of perfect control,” as I have labeled it.]

But Zittrain is the equivalent of the St. Peter upon which the Church of Lessigism has been built and, like any good disciple, he’s still vociferously preaching to the unconverted and using fire and brimstone sermons to warn of our impending digital damnation. In fact, he’s taken it to all new extremes. In Future of the Internet, Jonathan argues that we run the risk of seeing the glorious days of the generative, open Net and digital devices give way to more “sterile, tethered devices” and closed networks. The future that he hopes to “stop” is one in which Apple, TiVo, Facebook, and Google — the central villains in his drama — are supposedly ceded too much authority over our daily lives because of a combination of (a) their wicked ways and (b) our ignorant ones.

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European Regulators Think Consumers Too Stupid to Know How to Download a Different Browser

by on June 11, 2009 · 30 comments

According to Ina Fried of CNet News, Microsoft plans to remove its Internet Explorer web browser from the new versions of Windows 7 when it ships it in Europe later this year. [Additional coverage at ZDNet.]  MS is apparently doing so to assuage the concerns of EU antitrust officials, who have been obsessed with the company for the past decade. [Update: Here is MS official announcement.]

Apparently, European officials think their citizens are too stupid to find an alternative browser.  I mean, seriously, how hard is it?  Does the competition lack name recognition such that consumers can’t find them?  Hmmm… Google and Apple seem to be pretty well known brands, and their browsers (Chrome & Safari) are pretty easy to find.  And then there’s Mozilla’s Firefox browser (my PC favorite) and Opera (my mobile phone favorite), which are outstanding browsers. [Incidentally, Firefox already has 31% share of the European market.]

OK, OK, the regulators might say, but these competitors are just too expensive!  Uh, no, wait… every one of them is free. So, strike that theory.

Well, the regulators need another theory then. How about illegal tying of products and services! You know, there’s only certain sites or services you can use with IE, right?   Nope, that theory doesn’t work either.  And does anyone believe that MS could really tie OS functionality to the use of IE? How long would the world tolerate Outlook e-mails or Word documents that only allowed linking to URLs via IE??  Come on.

OK, any other theories left? Not that I can think of. Which brings us back to the only theory the Euro-crats have left: people are sheep. They’ll take whatever MS bundles into the OS free, you see, and they will use it more than they use competing products.  Thus, we regulators have to save them from their own stupidity! The masses just don’t know what’s good for them!  These free, integrated services are harming them! And, therefore, the only remaining solution is to kill innovation by crippling functionality and removing the free offering. That’s pro-consumer! … or so say the European antitrust bureaucrats.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, a whole lotta innovation continues to take place. But shhhh.. don’t tell the Euro-crats. They need a company to pick on. Welcome to the Theater of the Techno-Absurd.

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More on “Open vs. Closed” Technologies & Business Models

by on May 10, 2009 · 20 comments

Over at the Verizon Policy Blog, Link Hoewing has a sharp piece up entitled, “Of Business Models and Innovation.” He makes a point that I have often stressed in my debates with Zittrain and Lessig, namely, that the whole “open vs. closed” debate is typically greatly overstated or misunderstood.   Hoewing correctly argues that:

The point is not that open or managed models are always better or worse.  The point is that there is no one “right” model for promoting innovation.  There are examples of managed and open business models that have been both good for innovation and bad for it. There are also examples of managed and open models that have both succeeded and failed.  The point is in a competitive market to let companies develop business models they believe will serve consumers best and see how things play out.

Exactly right.  Moreover, the really important point here is that there exists a diverse spectrum of innovative digital alternatives from which to choose. Along the “open vs. closed” spectrum, the range of digital technologies and business models continues to grow and grow in both directions.  Do you want wide-open, tinker-friendly devices, sites, or software? You got it. Do you want a more closed, simple, and safe online experience?  You can have that, too.  And there are plenty of choices in between.

This is called progress!

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Major Filings in FCC’s “Child Safe Viewing Act” Notice of Inquiry

by on April 20, 2009 · 12 comments

As anyone who has spent time searching for comments on the FCC’s website can tell you, the agency doesn’t exactly have the most user-friendly website.  In the interest of making it easier for others to read the comments that came in last week in the agency’s “Child Safe Viewing Act” Notice of Inquiry, I have compiled all the major comments (those over 3 or 4 pages) and provided links to them below the fold.

Again, this proceeding was required under the “Child Safe Viewing Act of 2007,” which Congress passed last year and President Bush signed last December. The goal of the bill and the FCC’s proceeding (MB 09-26) is to study “advanced blocking technologies” that “may be appropriate across a wide variety of distribution platforms, including wired, wireless, and Internet platforms.”  I filed 150+ pages worth of comments in this matter last week, and here’s my analysis of why this bill and the FCC’s proceeding are worth monitoring closely.

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Comments in FCC “Child Safe Viewing Act” Proceeding

by on April 15, 2009 · 13 comments

Today I filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in its proceeding examining the marketplace for “advanced blocking technologies.”  This proceeding was required under the “Child Safe Viewing Act of 2007,” which Congress passed last year and President Bush signed last December. The goal of the bill and the FCC’s proceeding (MB 09-26) is to study “advanced blocking technologies” that “may be appropriate across a wide variety of distribution platforms, including wired, wireless, and Internet platforms.”  My colleagues will no doubt laugh about the fact that I have dropped an absurd 150 pages worth of comments on the FCC in this matter, but I had a lot to say on this topic!  Parental controls, child safety, and free speech issues have been the focus of much of my research agenda over the past 10 years.

In my filing, I argue that the FCC should tread carefully in this matter since the agency has no authority over most of the media platforms and technologies described in the Commission’s recent Notice of Inquiry.  Moreover, any related mandates or regulatory actions in in this area could diminish future innovation in this field and would violate the First Amendment rights of media creators and consumers alike.  The other major conclusions of my filing are as follows:

  • There exists an unprecedented abundance of parental control tools to help parents decide what constitutes acceptable media content in their homes and in the lives of their children.
  • There is a trade-off between complexity and convenience for both tools and ratings, and no parental control tool is completely foolproof.
  • Most homes have no need for parental control technologies because parents rely on other methods or there are no children in the home.
  • The role of household media rules and methods is underappreciated and those rules have an important bearing on this debate.
  • Parental control technologies work best in combination with educational efforts and parental involvement.
  • The search for technological silver-bullets and “universal” solutions represent a quixotic, Holy Grail-like quest and it will destroy innovation in this marketplace.
  • Enforcement of “household standards” made possible through use of parental controls and other methods negates the need for “community standards”-based content regulation.

My entire filing can be found here and down below in a Scribd reader.  All comments in the matter are due tomorrow and then reply comments are due on May 18th.

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Privacy Solutions (Part 4): Firefox Privacy Features

by on March 16, 2009 · 631 comments

Firefox logoAs noted in the first installment of our “Privacy Solution Series,” we are outlining various user-empowerment or user “self-help” tools that allow Internet users to better protect their privacy online-and especially to defeat tracking for online behavioral advertising purposes. These tools and methods form an important part of a layered approach that we believe offers an effective alternative to government-mandated regulation of online privacy.

In the last installment, we covered the privacy features embedded in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) 8. This installment explores the privacy features in the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox 3, both the current 3.0.7 version and the second beta for the next release, 3.5 (NOTE – The name for the next version of Firefox was just changed from 3.1 to 3.5 to reflect the large number of changes, but the beta is still named 3.1 Beta 2). We’ll make it clear which features are new to 3.1/3.5 and those which are shared with 3.0.7. Future installments will cover Google’s Chrome 1.0, Apple’s Safari 4, and some of the more useful privacy plug-ins for browsers . The availability and popularity of privacy plug-ins for Firefox such as AdBlock (which we discussed here), NoScript and Tor significantly augments the privacy management capabilities of Firefox beyond the capability currently baked into the browser.  In evaluating the Web browsers, we examine:

(1) cookie management; (2) private browsing; and (3) other privacy features

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Privacy Solutions (Part 3): Internet Explorer Privacy Features

by on March 6, 2009 · 615 comments

By Adam Thierer, Berin Szoka, & Adam Marcus

IE logoAs noted in the first installment of our “Privacy Solution Series,” we are outlining various user-empowerment or user “self-help” tools that allow Internet users to better protect their privacy online-and especially to defeat tracking for online behavioral advertising purposes.  These tools and methods form an important part of a layered approach that we believe offers an effective alternative to government-mandated regulation of online privacy.

In some of the upcoming installments we will be exploring the privacy controls embedded in the major web browsers consumers use today: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) 8, the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox 3, Google’s Chrome 1.0, and Apple’s Safari 4. In evaluating these browsers, we will examine three types of privacy features:

(1) cookie management controls; (2) private browsing; and (3) other privacy features

We will first be focusing on the default features and functions embedded in the browsers. We plan to do subsequent installments on the various downloadable “add-ons” available for browsers, as we already did for AdBlock Plus in the second installment of this series. Continue reading →

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Shame on Mozilla

by on February 10, 2009 · 11 comments

Over at Ars, Ryan Paul has an appropriately sharp-tongued response to the Mozilla Foundation’s troubling move to become a cheerleader for the European Commission’s ongoing antitrust efforts against Microsoft. Apparently Mozilla will assist the EC’s investigation “by offering expertise about the browser market.”

Paul focuses on what’s wrong with this in both a micro and macro sense. He rightly points out that the potential remedies here do not bode well for the future of this sector, since regulatory tinkering with high-tech product standards is bound to end badly and create a terrible precedent for future interventions. “It’s hard to find a rational argument in favor of mandatory standards enforcement,”  Paul says. “It would be punitive and unhelpful to the advancement of the web.” Moreover, Paul notes that things have never looked better on the browser front:

Claims that Microsoft’s monopoly status has eliminated competition in the browser market sound hollow in the face of the profoundly vibrant browser market that exists today. The record-setting launch of Firefox 3 added up to over 8 million downloads in the first 24 hours alone. Firefox’s global market share continues to climb every month and the browser has grabbed almost 30 percent of the European market.

And let’s not forget about those two little companies called Google and Apple who have competing products in the field! They’re making serious inroads in the browser wars. Moreover, Microsoft is struggling to hold on to whatever “dominance” they have left in their core market: OS. As Paul concludes:

To the observant tech enthusiast, all signs seem to indicate that Microsoft’s monopoly is on its way out. The Redmond giant is in no danger of annihilation, but it’s definitely not positioned to dictate terms to the rest of the industry anymore.

But what is perhaps most shocking about Mozilla’s call for intervention is the way that Mozilla Foundation chairperson Mitchell Baker minimizes the importance of not just Firefox, but the entire open source movement, when justifying EC intervention in this marketplace.

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Generativity Alive and Well with the IPhone

by on February 5, 2009 · 8 comments

I’ve been hammering Jonathan Zittrain pretty hard here over the past year for the thesis he sets forth in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It that digital “generativity” is at risk today. The reason I have been doing so is because all signs point in the exact opposite direction, and more so with each passing day. Contrary to Jonathan’s fear that the Internet and digital technologies are growing more closed, tethered, and sterile, I have argued that the facts on the ground show us how the world is actually becoming far more open, untethered, and innovative.  And that’s true even for the technology that Jonathan singles out in the book for special scorn — the iPhone.

Consider David Pogue’s post today on the New York Times‘ technology blog today entitled “So Many iPhone Apps, So Little Time.” Pogue reports that:

there are now 15,000 programs available on the App Store, and so many more are flooding in that Apple’s army of screeners can’t even keep up. I keep meaning to write a thoughtful, thorough roundup of the very best of these amazing programs, but every day that I don’t do it, the job becomes more daunting. […] Apple, which runs the store, keeps 30 percent of each sale. Even so, Ocarina [an application Pogue discusses in his essay] demonstrates that a programmer can make a staggering amount of money from the iPhone store. It’s a crazy new software model that I don’t remember seeing anywhere else. It’s not a boxed software program for $600, or even a shareware program you download for $25. It’s a buck a copy. The beauty here is that at these prices, there’s very little risk in trying something out. How many software programs have you bought for your Mac or PC? Two? Four? Well, the average iPhone owner may wind up installing 10, 20 or 30 programs. In all, according to Apple, iPhone owners have downloaded 500 million copies of these programs. Half a billion–since last July. There’s a lot of gloom in the tech industry (and every industry, for that matter). But even when the economy is crashing down around us, there’s still amazing power in a single good idea. And the one on display here–pricing software so low that millions of people buy it without batting an eye–is turning a few clever programmers into millionaires.

I ask you: Does this sound like a world that is growing less generative, as Zittrain argues? Because it sure doesn’t sound like it to me.  Moreover, if you still don’t think the iPhone is open enough, then there’s always a simple solution to that: just buy another phone!

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Apple’s MultiTouch Patent

by on January 27, 2009 · 5 comments

Sid Rosenzweig, who recently joined PFF to study patent issues, has a very thoughtful piece about Apple’s new patent on the multi-touch interface on the iPhone, which ends as follows:

It is striking how protection for user interfaces has changed over the years.  It is not clear that patent protection for user interfaces is a step in the right direction, even for iconic breakthroughs in interfaces such as for the iPhone and iPod Touch.  The 300 diagrams in this Apple patent call to mind the 189 graphical user-interface elements of the Apple v. Microsoft copyright infringement case from the early 1990s.  The Apple v. Microsoft case prevented Apple from obtaining the protection on the overall look-and-feel of its software, and instead treated as discrete each element of the user interface.  This patent, and others like it, purport to cover the combination of several elements — here the web scrolling with the photo-album browsing — and not the discrete elements themselves.  With the Apple v. Microsoft case largely having thrown copyright out the window, and with trade dress protection excluding functional elements, patents are really the only option for companies like Apple, until and unless another solution is found.

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