I dashed off a piece for CNET today on the Copyright Office’s cell phone “jailbreaking” rulemaking earlier this week. Though there has already been extensive coverage (including solid pieces in The Washington Post, a New York Times editorial, CNET, and Techdirt), there were a few interesting aspects to the decision I thought were worth highlighting.
Most notably, I was interested that no one had discussed the possibility and process by which Apple or other service providers could appeal the rulemaking. Ordinarily, parties who object to rules enrolled by administrative agencies can file suit in federal district court under the Administrative Procedures Act. Such suits are difficult to win, as courts give deference to administrative determinations and review them only for errors of law. But a win for the agency is by no means guaranteed. Continue reading →
Better late than never, I’ve finally given a close read to the Notice of Inquiry issued by the FCC on June 17th. (See my earlier comments, “FCC Votes for Reclassification, Dog Bites Man”.) In some sense there was no surprise to the contents; the Commission’s legal counsel and Chairman Julius Genachowski had both published comments over a month before the NOI that laid out the regulatory scheme the Commission now has in mind for broadband Internet access.
Chairman Genachowski’s “Third Way” comments proposed an option that he hoped would satisfy both extremes. The FCC would abandon efforts to find new ways to meet its regulatory goals using “ancillary jurisdiction” under Title I (an avenue the D.C. Circuit had wounded, but hadn’t actually exterminated, in the Comcast decision), but at the same time would not go as far as some advocates urged and put broadband Internet completely under the telephone rules of Title II.
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. . . when you realize how much data it can give up to law enforcement and phone thieves. Or maybe one of you smarties will write an app that wipes your iPhone clean, restoring your control over personal and private communications information.
NY venture capitalist Fred Wilson notes eight advantages of using the iPhone’s Safari browser over iPhone apps to access content. Fred’s arguments seem pretty sound to me and help to illustrate the point I was trying to make a few months ago in a heated exchange over Adam’s post on Apple’s App Store, Porn & “Censorship”: Although Apple restricts pornographic apps, it does not restrict what iPhone (or iPad or iTouch) users can access on their browsers. (And it’s not censorship, anyway, because that’s what governments do!)
As I noted in that exchange, the main practical advantage of apps right now over the browser seems to be the ability to play videos from websites that require Flash—which is especially useful for porn! Apple has rejected using Flash on the iPhone on technical grounds, in favor of HTML5, which will allow websites to display video without Flash—including on mobile devices. But once HTML5 is implemented (large scale adoption expected in 2012), this primary advantage of apps over mobile Safari will disappear: Users will be able to view porn on their browsers without needing to rely on apps—and Apple’s control over apps based on their content will no longer matter so much, if at all.
Of course, it may take several more years for HTML5 to really become
the standard, but what matters is that all Apple products, including mobile Safari, already support HTML5. So it’s just a question of when porn sites move from Flash to HTML5. That seems already to be happening, with major porn publishers already starting the transition. The main stumbling block seems to be HTML5 support from the other browser makers. But Internet Explorer 9 supports HTML5, and is expected out early in 2011 with a beta version due out this August. Mozilla’s Firefox 4.0 (formerly 3.7) also promises HTML5 support and is due out this November. Since porn publishers have always been on the cutting edge of implementing new web technologies, I’d bet we’ll start seeing many porn sites move to HTML5 by this Christmas. And by Christmas 2011, as we all sit around the fire with Grandma sipping eggnog and enjoying our favorite adult websites on our overpriced-but-elegant Apple products loading in HTML5 in the Safari browser, we’ll all look back and wonder why anyone made such a big deal about Apple restricting porn apps.
Oh, and if you get tired of waiting,
get an Android phone! Anyway, here are my comments on Adam’s February post: Continue reading →
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.
By Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka
As we mentioned yesterday, in a new series of essays, we will be examining proposals being put forward today that would have the government play a greater role in sustaining struggling media enterprises, “saving journalism,” or promoting more “public interest” content. With many traditional media operators struggling, and questions being raised about how journalism in particular will be supported in the future, Washington policymakers are currently considering what role government can and should play in helping media providers reinvent themselves in the face of tumultuous technological change wrought by the Digital Revolution. We will be releasing 6 or 7 essays on this topic leading up to our big filing in the FCC’s “Future of Media” proceeding (deadline is May 7th).
In the first installment of our series, we will critique an old idea that’s suddenly gained new currency: taxing media devices or distribution systems to fund media content. We argue that such media income redistribution is fundamentally inconsistent with American press traditions, highly problematic under the First Amendment, difficult to implement in a world of media abundance and platform convergence, and likely to cause serious negative side effects. Bottom line: Don’t tax our iPhones or broadband to subsidize media!
We’ve attached the entire text of the piece below. (Installment #2, on broadcast spectrum taxes to subsidize public media, will be released next week.)
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I’m quoted briefly in a story today in E-Commerce Times (see “Apple’s Patent Attack: This Too May be Overhyped” by Erika Morphy) about the patent lawsuit filed this week by Apple against rival mobile device maker HTC.
Apple, of course, produces the iPhone, while HTC makes Google’s Nexus One and other devices that run on Google’s Android operating system.
So right from the start this case looks less like a simple patent dispute and more like a warning shot over Google’s bow. The two companies are increasingly becoming rivals. In August of last year, Google CEO Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple’s board. Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrote at the time, “Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric’s effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished….” Continue reading →
So, do I need to remind everyone of my ongoing rants about Jonathan Zittrain’s misguided theory about the death of digital generativity because of the supposed rise of “sterile, tethered” devices? I hope not, because even I am getting sick of hearing myself talk about it. But here again anyway is the obligatory listing of all my tirades: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 + video and my 2-part debate with Lessig and him last year.
You will recall that the central villain in Zittrain’s drama
The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It is big bad Steve Jobs and his wicked little iPhone. And then, more recently, Jonathan has fretted over those supposed fiends at Facebook. Zittrain’s worries that “we can get locked into these platforms” and that “markets [will] coalesce [around] these tamer gated communities,” making it easier for both corporations and governments to control us. More generally, Zittrain just doesn’t seem to like that some people don’t always opt for the same wide open general purpose PC experience that he exalts as the ideal. As I noted in my original review of his book, Jonathan doesn’t seem to appreciate that it may be perfectly rational for some people to seek stability and security in digital devices and their networking experiences—even if they find those solutions in the form of “tethered appliances” or “sterile” networks, to use his parlance.
Every once and awhile I find a sharp piece by someone out there who is willing to admit that they see nothing wrong with such “closed”
platforms or devices, or they even argue that those approaches can be superior to the more “open” devices and platforms out there. That’s the case with this Harry McCracken rant over at Technologizer today with the entertaining title, “The Verizon Droid is a Loaf of Day-Old Bread.” McCracken goes really hard on the Droid — which hurts because I own one! — and I’m not sure I entirely agree with his complaint about it, but what’s striking is how it represents the antithesis of Zittrainianism: Continue reading →
Oh my, here we go again with bogus accusations of “censorship” flying about a private company’s efforts to self-regulate its own media platform. Yesterday over at Silicon Alley Insider, Nick Saint penned a piece on how, “Apple’s War On Porn Is Just Getting Started.” And then over at TechCrunch, Jason Kincaid wrote about “Why Apple’s New Ban Against Sexy Apps Is Scary.” That yielded a flurry of similarly-titled rants about Apple’s supposedly totalitarian ways for taking away our new-found inalienable human right to unfettered porn and adult entertainment applications via our iPhones. To Mr. Saint, Mr. Kincaid, and the many others who apparently believe Apple is the reincarnation of Big Brother for self-regulating their own Apps Store, all I can say is: Grow up!
Here are a few things they need to consider:
- What Apple decides to do with its application store, and what it chooses to provide in it, is Apple’s own business—quite literally. Like a traditional bricks-and-mortar retailer, they can make policies about what types of content might be deemed too sensitive for the broad community of customers they serve. WalMart, for example, doesn’t carry certain types of music in their stores. If customers don’t like what those retailers are doing, there’s always another place for them to take their business and find what they are looking for.
- When it comes to the Apple controversy, we are generally talking about porn. Note to Mr. Saint and Mr. Kincaid and other whiners… there are plenty of other places to find porn on the Net! Seriously, have you looked?
- A private company’s decision to self-censor by not carrying something in their store is not even in the same universe as the sort of censorship we see government officials engage in, which blocks all content from all platforms. There is no escape from that sort of all-encompassing censorship. Continue reading →
Harvard Berkman Center professor Jonathan Zittrain has published another pessimistic, Steve-Jobs-is-Taking-Us-Straight-To-Cyber-Hell editorial building on the gloomy thesis he set forth in his 2008 book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. His latest piece appears in the Financial Times and it’s entitled, “A Fight over Freedom at Apple’s Core. Concerning the recent Apple iPad announcement, Zittrain warns: “Mr Jobs ushered in the personal computer era and now he is trying to usher it out.”
I’m not going to go into yet another lengthy dissertation about what it so misguided about his thesis that cyberspace is becoming more “regulable” and that digital “generativity” is dying because of the rise of devices like the iPhone & iPad, or sites like Facebook. Instead, I will just point you to the many things I’ve written before explaining just how far off the mark Prof. Zittrain is on this point. [See the complete list down below + video of our debate.]
But let me just say this… Ignoring that fact that he is an iPhone user himself — which makes no sense considering that he thinks of Apple as the font of all cyber-evil — he can’t muster any substantive empirical evidence proving that the Net and digital devices are being more “closed, sterile, and tethered,” as he repeatedly claims in his book and editorials. And that’s not surprising because the reality is that the digital world is more open and generative than ever, and even if there are some “closed” devices and systems out there, they are actually quite innovative and not perfectly closed as Zittrain suggests. The spectrum of “open vs. closed” systems and devices is incredible diverse and nothing is
perfectly “open” or “closed.” We can have the best of both worlds: many open systems with some partial “walled gardens” here and there (or hybrid systems combining both). Regardless, we are witnessing greater digital “generativity” and innovation with each passing year. Until Zittrain can prove the opposite, his thesis must be considered a failure.
Finally, I want to associate myself with this excellent critique of the Zittrain thesis by Prof. Ed Felten, who points out that Zittrain’s argument doesn’t even work for the iPad, which I would agree is a fairly “closed appliance” in the Zittrainian scheme of the things:
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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.