Advocates of regulation will credit regulators for the fact that major browser providers Microsoft and Mozilla are going after online “tracking.” In forthcoming versions of their browsers, they will provide controls that protect against unwanted monitoring even better than the controls that now exist.

When consumer advocates cluster in Washington, D.C., asking federal agencies to solve consumer issues, of course, any progress on the issues will be credited to the threat of coercion. But experiments like these have no controls.

Decisions about the qualities of goods and services are made out at the leading edge of consumer demand, where producers work to anticipate developing public interests. Meeting demand after it has been realized is a recipe for business failure because competitors getting there before the others win market share and profits. Laggards are losers.

You can tell when regulators push for something that does not match up with consumer demand as perceived in the business sector. The regulators get nowhere. That would be the FTC’s call a decade ago for a suite of regulations requiring “notice, choice, access, and security.” The current push for “tracking” controls does appear to meet up with consumer demand, and, again, the browser providers are working on it years ahead of what any regulation would have required.

I’ve put “tracking” in scare quotes because the open question is just what anyone means by the word. The report linked above notes a comment from Google, provider of the Chrome browser:

“The idea of ‘Do Not Track’ is interesting, but there doesn’t seem to be consensus on what ‘tracking’ really means, nor how new proposals could be implemented in a way that respects people’s current privacy controls,” said the company…

Maybe Google will be the laggard and loser for not moving on “tracking” as fast as its competitors. That’s one approach, while Microsoft and Mozilla will each take a different tack to the problem. The result will be an experiment that does have controls. The browser provider that meets up with consumer interests, in the consumer-friendliest way, wins. Such would not be the case if a federal regulation—yes, one-size-fits-all—determined what “tracking” was and how browsers or others would provide protection against it.

Marketplace competition will do better than any other known method for determining what “tracking” means to consumers and what to do about it. There is no privacy advocate, there is no technologist, no advocacy group, nor academic who knows what to do here.

The one thing I recommend is that do-not-track efforts should control the content of the header and the domains the browser communicates with. Simply putting a “do-not-track” signal in the header would punt the problem back to regulators and the cadre that surrounds them. This group would come up with something that satisfies itself, the regulatory community, but that does not digest and reconcile actual consumers’ competing interests in privacy, convenience, access to content, and so on.

Third on the headlines today on TechMeme (perhaps the leading tech news aggregator) is this headline: “An Apology To Our Readers,” a heart-felt piece from TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington disclosing that a TechCrunch intern had, on at least two occasions, demanded computers from start-ups as compensation for writing favorable blog posts about them on the highly influential site. The intern was immediately suspended and, when the allegation was confirmed, terminated. Arrington made no excuses for Daniel Brusilovsky on account of his age (he’s under 18). You can read Daniel’s response here.

If this incident demonstrates anything, it’s just how essential it is for a site like TechCrunch to, as Arrington promised his readers in closing, “maintain complete transparency with you on how we operate, even when it isn’t such an easy thing to do.” Arrington went so far as to have “deleted all content created by this person on our blogs”—indeed, “every word written by this person on the TechCrunch network,” which presumably includes comments.

One might take from this the lesson that the press, as it evolves from the newspaper model towards something blog-ier but still hard to pin down precisely, can police itself pretty darn well. Alas, the FTC has taken a much dimmer view of the ability of reputational incentives to discipline the influence that might be exerted by “blogola” payments (cash or in-kind) on editorial discretion and journalistic creation. Last October, the FTC updated its “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising” to provide that bloggers should disclose any direct financial interest in subjects they write about if they wish to avoid being subject to an FTC enforcement action—even though no such endorsement is required of traditional journalists, as Adam noted. The best response to this was probably this splendid open letter from Randall Rothenberg, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, as Adam noted here.

TechCrunch goes out of their way to avoid even the appearance of bias—just as traditional publications do, if not more so! So why should they be subject to special FTC scrutiny? Of course, if a site sets forth a policy about endorsements, it would clearly be held to that promise by the FTC and any violation for breaking that promise could be considered an “unfair” or “deceptive” trade practice under the FTC’s existing statutory authority.

If the FTC really wanted to encourage other sites to follow the lead of TechCrunch, they could encourage (but not bully) others into developing some kind of a seal program like that developed by TrustE that would lay out core principles for how sites handle blogola and product endorsements. If a site wanted to advertise its commitment to these principles, it could display the seal on its site—and be held to that commitment by the FTC (with a self-regulatory group perhaps providing additional enforcement or auditing). If a site chose not to do so, users would be able to see that, too.

A very robust version of this idea could take the next step and use a machine-readable tag so that any site choosing to participate in a “trust seal” program wouldn’t have to rely on just putting this icon on its page, but could instead simply include, in the packets sent to users who visit the page, the tag that corresponds to either (a) the URL for its own endorsement policy or (b) the URL for the for that “trust seal” seal program the site participates in. That tag could then be “read” by a plug-in or a tool built directly into the browser that would either link to the disclosure page or display an appropriate “trust” icon for the site next to the address bar, just as HTTPS sites using SSL encryption get a special green block or safe-looking lock next to their URL. (This is precisely the kind of interface the Mozilla Foundation is thinking about implementing its Firefox browser for websites’ privacy policies.) When the user clicks on that icon, they could get more information about the site’s policies or how the trust seal program works.

The important thing about such a concept, however implemented, is that there could be multiple seal programs out there, each of which could do the hard work of figuring out what appropriate disclosure policies could be and how to make them work in an evolving medium. Given TechCrunch’s leadership in this area, I’d say the TechCrunch seal program could be a gold standard in the online news and commentary business.

This is the kind of innovation that could occur in this space (and others, like privacy) if users really care as much about blogola as the FTC thinks they do—and if the FTC encouraged innovation in disclosure and self-regulation instead of trying to write proscriptive rules to cover all possible situations. (In fairness to the FTC, what I’m proposing works well for “first party” content authored by a site’s employees but there’s a separate problem of how to deal with “third party” content like blog comments on someone else’s site. If a company sends its employees to post comments or reviews praising its products on another blog or, say, on Amazon’s product reviews, I don’t really have a problem with expecting that company to require that its employees disclose their affiliation when they post elsewhere because there probably isn’t a better way to deal with this issue.)

For now, I’m content that sites like TechCrunch are already actively guarding their reputation with prompt disciplinary action such as what Arrington described today. The more attention paid to responsible self-regulation like this, the more other sites will be prompted to follow TechCrunch’s lead—and keep innovating in how to build systems and interfaces that assure user trust.

The disabled have much to give thanks for this year—but contrary to common assumptions, it’s not for paternalistic government accessibility mandates, regulations or subsidies (see, for example, the FCC’s November 6 Broadband Accessibility workshop), but for the good ol’ fashioned private sector ingenuity that has made America great. Five broad categories of examples suggest how constantly-improving computing power and innovation can make life easier for many, if not all, disabled users—and how market forces empower the disabled along with everyone else.

Video transcription. Last week, Google announced “the preliminary roll-out of automatic captioning in YouTube, an innovation that takes advantage of our speech recognition technology to turn the spoken word into text captions.” Google uses the same speech recognition technology it refined with its free Goog-411 and Google Voice services to automatically transcribe video dialog (which can also be automatically translated using Google’s translation engine). Why? Not because of any government mandate, but because of some combination of three factors: (i) it’s an easy way for Google to invest in its “reputational capital,” (ii) the underlying technologies of transcribing videos make videos easier to use for all users, not just the hearing-impaired, and (iii) those technologies also make it possible to contextually target advertising to the verbal content of videos.

It’s worth noting that Hulu currently offers closed captioning for some of its television programming but notes that “closed-captioning data that’s used for broadcast TV isn’t easily translated for online use.” The online television clearinghouse promises to offer more closed-captioning soon. Perhaps they ought to license Google’s algorithmic transcription?

Voice recognition for direct consumer use—most notably, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, the latest version of the leading voice recognition software, which was released in summer 2008 but only recently seems to have really hit critical mass. By many accounts, and my own personal experience over the last few months (having lost the use of my left hand due to cartilege damage), Dragon 10 is the first speech recognition program that is really “ready for prime time”—good enough that I will very likely continue using it, at least sometimes, even after my wrist heals in the coming months. (I used it to write this post.) It offers non-disabled consumers functionality like dictation-on-the go and points to a day when everyone gets their own personal transcription secretary—think: 1950s office culture meets artificial intelligence.

While Dragon standard currently retails for $50.99 on Amazon (list Price: $99.99), Microsoft’s new Windows 7 includes voice-recognition functionality that is not terribly far behind Dragon in quality among its built-in accessibility features (although, when it comes to voice-recognition, small differences in quality are well worth the cost).

Jon Morrow (Associate Editor of Copyblogger), whose muscular dystrophy rendered him quadriplegic, provides a definitive guide to speech recognition for bloggers, focusing on Dragon:

Voice recognition for search. Google Voice Search, initially launched on the iPhone a year ago, and more recently made available on other mobile devices. By allowing users to search from their phones without typing, the program makes search just that much more accessible for users who have difficulty typing—something I was very grateful for as I recovered from my wrist surgery, with only my Droid to keep me (and my one good hand) company—and allow me to blog! While this is a small step, it foreshadows a day in which all mobile devices will have the kind of speech recognition capability Dragon makes possible on the desktop today.  Given the rapid and constant increase in computing power made possible by Moore’s Law, it’s just a matter of time before this dream comes true.

What these first three product categories have in common, besides speech-to-text functionality, is that they are not exclusively geared to the disabled. Instead, each also offers functionality to a broader market.

Text-to-speech functionality. This is one of the accessibility highlights of Windows 7. Adobe has also improved the screen reader functionality in its Acrobat Reader 9 software. While these features are primarily geared towards the disabled, the quality of text-to-speech automation has improved to the point that it is actually being used for a mass-market.

• Exhibit A: AudioDizer, a service that aims to “enable newspapers, magazines, and blogs to distribute their content in MP3 format for every single article published.” While AudioDizer won’t replace good human readers anytime soon, such software will increasingly remove the absolute necessity—and cost—of having someone read text material you want to podcast. This, in turn, will revolutionize podcasting by making it nearly costless and effortless to put text into audio form.  The quality is probably not acceptable for most people yet, but for many other hard-core “listenists” (people who consume audio content as voraciously as the most dedicated readers), it’s simply revolutionary to have access to a library of audio content potentially as large as the text-Internet itself.  For me, this means I can make better use of the time I spend puttering around the house—or, in my two-arm days, folding laundry, going to the gym  or riding my bike. (I am a particularly big fan of the MIT Technology Review podcast, which will give you an idea of the quality of AudioDizer.) But for the visually impaired, AudioDizer could be far more profoundly important.  In either case, the “killer app” for text-to-speech will be the level of quality finally achieved in speech-to-text by Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10.
• Exhibit B: the text-to-speech capability in Amazon’s Kindle 2 reader device. While the Kindle itself is difficult for the visually impaired or blind to use, the mainstreaming of such functionality will ultimately benefit such disabled users by increasing the incentive to improve text-to-speech functionality. Sadly, after receiving (debatable) copyright complaints from the Author’s Guild, Amazon decided to turn this functionality off  for all books, unless activated by the publisher (an opt-in). If the technology were actually good enough to be a substitute for an audiobook, the Authors Guild’s complaint would be more understandable. Unfortunately, such an opt-in will probably delay the popular acceptance of text-to-speech functionality by average users.

Open source & open platforms.  Their growing success in the marketplace (not because of government, mind you!) likely means that disabled consumers will have more choices.

• Software: There are a slew of accessibility-oriented add-ons for the Firefox browser, and Mozilla makes it easy to find such tools by allowing users to group related add-ons into “Collections” such as this one. In particular, the Firefox Accessibility Extension has been downloaded nearly 150,000 times.
• Hardware: The success of open operating systems such as Google’s Android should make it easier for device manufacturers to build devices with specialty features, say, for the visually-impaired. Certainly, it would be easier to do so than to build such functionality into all iPhones. At the very least, a diversity of form factors will create more real options for the sometimes very specific needs of the disabled.  For example, I simply could not have typed effectively with one hand on my old HTC XV6800, but my new Motorola Droid, with its superior on-screen keyboard and different form factor allows me to type fairly effectively with just one hand (as does my partners iPhone).

Tying It All Together

That’s really the key lesson here: While many advocates for the disabled may complain that the iPhone isn’t as accessible as they might like, mandating accessibility features for all devices comes at a real costs for users: There’s only so much you can fit into a single device. If government mandates additional features, something has to give, because we live in a world of trade-offs: price, bulk, weight, etc. But a world with many devices and competing operating systems is a world in which niche markets are increasingly being served—primarily because Moore’s Law increasingly makes it cost-effective to do so.

The “disabled” are not a monolith but represent a wide spectrum of interface needs along the long tail of human ability-diversity. Rather than trying to stunt the functionality of all devices in the name of “fairness,” we ought to be focusing on the ways in which falling prices, increasing processing power and the increasing efficiency of small-scale consumer electronic device manufacturing make possible an increased degree, and diversity, of functionality previously inconceivable. We also ought to look for ways to make sure that government doesn’t inadvertently get away this ongoing process, such as through cumbersome device testing requirements or by restricting the exclusive handset arrangements that make it possible for wireless carriers to subsidize the cost of expensive devices. The latter is especially important for achieving the kind of scale in adoption of a device that could help make it worthwhile to develop and bring to market specialty devices—say, for the visually-impaired.

The offerings for the disabled will probably always lag behind those for average consumers, but complaining about that is a lot like complaining about the fact that the rich tend to be the only ones who can initially afford new inventions—from air travel to air conditioning to refrigerators to personal computing.  Just as the wealthy tends to fund the investments in these technologies, to the benefit of “average” consumers, so, too, will the mass market for functionalities like speech-to-text and text-to-speech drive the perfection of these technologies, which are particularly important for disabled users.

Of course, there are are indeed some accessibility functionalities necessitated by certain disabilities that may not have such ready dual-use among a mass audience. But I suspect that accessibility functionalities will become increasingly indistinguishable from tools developed for average users.  The main distinction will lie in the fact that for the disabled, these tools may be a life-changing “necessity,” while for most users, they may merely be “cool” or simply “useful.”  Case in point: the volume level on my new Droid’s speakerphone is so loud that it will likely make the phone “accessible” for many heart-of-hearing users who simply couldn’t hear previous smartphones. For me, it’s a nifty feature (and sometimes even annoyance), while for them it may be a fantastic relief.

More generally, it’s important to recognize the diversity of incentives that makes possible this diversity of functionalities for a diversely-capable citizenry: For some companies, like Nuance (maker of Dragon NaturallySpeaking) the disabled are a key market. And anticapitalist critic might claim that “they’re just in it for the money.”  But as Adam Smith said, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” In other words, it’s a good thing that there are companies out there who try to meet the needs of the disabled. (The Internet has made it easier than ever before for disabled consumers to find products that meet their needs.  Just Google the keywords “disabled products” and you’ll get over 57 million hits.) For some companies, the motive to  invest in accessibility innovation may be “philanthropic”—i.e., a down payment on consumer goodwill. And for other companies, the motive may be more mixed: Google clearly gains additional advertising audience by reaching the disabled, and also uses its accessibility technologies to serve ads better and making it easier for all users to conduct searches.

As for the broader subject of “neuro-diversity” (the broad spectrum of human cognitive abilities and not necessarily a “disability”), I highly recommend Tyler Cohen’s new book Create Your Own Economy (reviewed by Adam here), which celebrates the Internet as a great emancipating force for the neuro-diverse.

Really, what would we do without European antitrust regulators protecting us from the evils of browser innovation? If Microsoft was allowed to actually bundle its Internet Explorer browser alongside its operating system we might actually do something really crazy… like perhaps try it! After all, the latest browser stats make it pretty clear most of us have a choice and that fewer and fewer of us rely on IE. As Erick Schonfeld noted on Tech Crunch today:

The new browser wars on on. More than a decade after Microsoft killed off Netscape with Internet Explorer, competition in the browser market has never been stronger. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times. Earlier in June, Apple released Safari 4. In March, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer 8, and Google came out with a speedier beta of its Chrome browser. Some early data is coming in showing relative market share and how fast people are upgrading. If you look at the chart above from Statcounter, it indicates that since March Internet Explorer has lost 11.4 percent market share to other browsers. [..] Where did that go? It went to Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Nearly 5 percent of that, or about half, went to Firefox 3.0, which currently has 27.6 percent market share. That doesn’t count last week’s upgrade.

Alas, as I pointed out in my essay a few weeks ago (“European Regulators Think Consumers Too Stupid to Know How to Download a Different Browser“), some Euro-crats still seem to believe that changing browsers requires great detective skills to unearth alternatives.  It’s just pure poppycock and yet another sad example of how antitrust law is usually hopelessly behind the times and has absolutely nothing to do with protecting consumers or fostering innovation.

Now, please excuse me while I get back to surfing the Net via Firefox and Chrome (and Opera on my mobile phone). My God, how did I ever find these browser alternatives!

Ted Dziuba has penned a humorous and sharp-tongued piece for The Register about last week’s Adblock vs. NoScript fiasco.  For those of you who aren’t Firefox junkies, a nasty public spat broke out between the makers of these two very popular Firefox Browser extensions (they are the #1 and #3 most popular downloads respectively).  To make a long and complicated story much shorter, basically, NoScript didn’t like Adblock placing them on their list of blacklisted sites and so they fought back by tinkering with the NoScript code to evade the prohibition.  Adblock responded by further tinkering with their code to circumvent the circumvention!  And then, as they say, words were exchanged.

Thus, a war of words and code took place.  In the end, however, it had a (generally) happy ending with NoScript backing down and apologizing. Regardless, Mr. Dzuiba doesn’t like the way things played out:

The real cause of this dispute is something I like to call Nerd Law.  Nerd Law is some policy that can only be enforced by a piece of code, a public standard, or terms of service. For example, under no circumstances will a police officer throw you to the ground and introduce you to his friend the Tazer if you crawl a website and disrespect the robots.txt file. The only way to adjudicate Nerd Law is to write about a transgression on your blog and hope that it gets to the front page of Digg. Nerd Law is the result of the pathological introversion software engineers carry around with them, being too afraid of confrontation after that one time in high school when you stood up to a jock and ended up getting your ass kicked.

Dziuba goes on to suggest that “If you actually talk to people, network, and make agreements, you’ll find that most are reasonable” and, therefore, this confrontation and resulting public fight could have been avoided. They “could have come to a mutually-agreeable solution,” he says.

But no. Sadly, software engineers will do what they were raised to do. And while it may be a really big hullabaloo to a very small subset of people who Twitter and blog their every thought as if anybody cared, to the rest of us, it just reaffirms our knowledge that it’s easy to exploit your average introvert.  After all, what’s he gonna do? Blog about it?

OK, so maybe the developers could have come to some sort of an agreement if they had opened direct channels of communications or, better yet, if someone at the Mozilla Foundation could have intervened early on and mediated the dispute.  At the end of the day, however, that did not happen and a public “Nerd War”  ensued.  But I’d like to say a word in defense of Nerd Law and public fights about “a piece of code, a public standard, or terms of service.”

What we had here was a code war that, despite some nastiness, was resolved reasonably well and on a reasonably timely basis.  Now, imagine if this sort of dispute had gone legal, or worse yet, been subjected to a federal regulatory proceeding.  Can you imagine the Federal Communications Commission being asked to adjudicate such a thing!  Next time you hear of a major dispute coming before the commission, start your stopwatch and pray that it doesn’t die before the FCC finally gets around to rendering its judgment on the matter at hand. Worse yet, sit back and watch as entire forests will fall from the resulting paperwork war as both sides hire teams of lawyers, economists, and consultants to file an endless stream of indecipherable documents with the Commission.

What got me thinking about all this is that recently I’ve been critiquing Lessig’s “code-is-law” thesis and pointing out that code really doesn’t have the same force as law, and thank God it doesn’t!  Precisely because it does not have the coercive capacity of actual law or regulation it means that code developers must use other means to persuade competitors or the public to side with them in disputes.  It means that code developers must find ways to innovate around problems, sometimes even creating messy code wars in the process.  And yes, it sometimes means that, when that process goes badly, a war of words may take place online.  But still, isn’t that better than the legal alternative or a regulatory approach?

And, so, when Mr. Dziuba suggests that “The only way to adjudicate Nerd Law is to write about a transgression on your blog and hope that it gets to the front page of Digg,” I guess I just don’t see as much of a downside to that approach as he does.  I share his belief that it would be nice to get both sides to a table to talk and hopefully to hammer out an agreement, but sometimes that doesn’t always happen in cyberspace or in realspace for that matter. What’s going on here is the same game that companies and unions have been playing for years:  Push the envelope in public by any means necessary to drive a better bargaining position when you eventually must come to the table and reach an agreement.  Athletes and sports clubs do the same thing.

Thus, I am rather fond of “Nerd Law,” or “Code Wars” or whatever you want to call it. (Perhaps “hard-nosed public negotiations” is the better umbrella term).  Let coders have their fights and air their dirty laundry in public because, at the end of the day, that process will likely reach a better conclusion than if they took a highly legalistic or regulatory approach to things.  I do not mean to suggest that law or regulation never has a place in resolving disputes. Rather, I am suggesting that the sheer cost of the legal / regulatory route — in terms of time, money, lost innovation opportunities, etc — makes is generally sub-optimal when compared to relying on non-legal means of dispute resolution.

So, let the coders have their Nerd Wars, I say.  And let the best code win.

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.

“The success of Mozilla and Firefox does not indicate a healthy marketplace for competitive products,” she wrote. “I am convinced that we could not have been, and will not be, successful except as a public benefit organization living outside the commercial motivations. And I certainly hope that neither the EU nor any other government expects to maintain a healthy Internet ecosystem based on nonprofits stepping in to correct market deficiencies.”

As Paul points out in his Ars story, “[Mozilla’s] position on this matter is highly questionable.” Indeed, I believe it’s more than just highly questionable, it’s a bit of insult to an entire community of developers. Paul is generally correct in his response that:

There are quite a few open source software enthusiasts who would argue that, for a broad range of software products, the emergence of a Mozilla-like model is actually desirable and highly advantageous for consumers. A point will eventually arrive for many kinds of software where there is simply no point in trying to derive value from shrink-wrapping it, and then efforts will converge around collaboratively-developed open source implementations that will displace and eliminate the need for proprietary commercial implementations. Why should that be viewed as unhealthy?

Indeed, but it actually goes beyond that. The message that Mozilla’s Baker seems to sending to the open source community is: You can’t change the world. Your voluntary, collaborative actions cannot correct market deficiencies or fulfill unmet needs.

Geez, isn’t that what the open source movement is all about?!  I’m hardly some sort of open source / free software fanatic — indeed, I envision a future full of plenty of open source AND proprietary types of software and service — but the beauty of the open source movement to me is the way it has so nicely filled unsatisfied niches of demand in the software universe.  And, here’s the really important point, as Paul points out in his Ars article:

The popularization of the open source development model arguably emerged as a response to Microsoft’s monopoly. Developers had to find innovative ways to compete with an entrenched product. If the government had intervened in the software industry at an early stage and those conditions hadn’t existed, the browser market could arguably be a lot less rich and competitive than it is today. If Internet Explorer had never gained the dominant marketshare to necessitate a change in the status quo, the only browser choices we would have today might be between an ad-encumbered Opera and a proprietary Netscape.

That is exactly right. I have been making the argument for many years that it is at a market’s supposedly darkest hour that we are likely seeing some of the most exciting innovation being spawned. People don’t innovate most when they are completely happy with the world around them. It’s when they are pissed-off that they get cracking!!  Mozilla’s Firefox is the perfect example of that. And so is just about everything that Google and Apple have developed in response to Microsoft over the past 10 years.

And yet, sadly, the folks at the Mozilla Foundation want to now become handmaidens to the state — and the European Commission, no less — in their pathetic effort to stick it to a competitor using the law instead of using more marketplace innovation and competition. SHAME ON YOU MOZILLA!  I would dump your browser today if I didn’t love it so much! And thank you to all the brilliant, dedicated people behind the scenes who do keep innovating and making Firefox even better. I sincerely hope that the Mozilla Foundation doesn’t speak for you on this matter.