It may be possible to wring consistency from the “open” manifesto Google SVP of Product Management Jonathan Rosenberg published earlier this week, but I can’t.

He correctly extols the virtues of openness in technology and data for its pro-competitive effects. Closed systems may be profitable in the short run, but they are weak innovation engines:

[A] well-managed closed system can deliver plenty of profits. They can also deliver well-designed products in the short run — the iPod and iPhone being the obvious examples — but eventually innovation in a closed system tends towards being incremental at best (is a four blade razor really that much better than a three blade one?) because the whole point is to preserve the status quo. Complacency is the hallmark of any closed system. If you don’t have to work that hard to keep your customers, you won’t.

But his paean to openness draws a tight line around Google’s profitable products:

While we are committed to opening the code for our developer tools, not all Google products are open source. Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in. In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users. The search and advertising markets are already highly competitive with very low switching costs, so users and advertisers already have plenty of choice and are not locked in. Not to mention the fact that opening up these systems would allow people to “game” our algorithms to manipulate search and ads quality rankings, reducing our quality for everyone.

This is a fascinating exhibition of self-focus. Rosenberg finds that the benefits of openness cut off just exactly where Google’s profitability kicks in (credit: Rob Beschizza on BoingBoing).

If Google were to open its search algorithm, torments would befall users, he says—but much moreso torment would befall Google because their competitive edge in search and ad placement would shrink. Their competition would have a real chance to catch up and lower the premium Google could charge advertisers.

Now, would opening the algorithm allow gaming? Yes. And a new burst of competition and creativity would further improve search and ad serving across the entire Internet—exactly the kind of improvement Rosenberg says Google strives to produce.

Rosenberg’s attempt to strip Google down to a coherent philosophy of openness fails—search and ad-serving are a codpiece staring you right in the face. Or, if you prefer, Google’s heart is closed…

SVPs of product management are free to be wrong about philosophy, of course. It doesn’t matter at all—except when Google tries to impose its philosophy on others. And in the debate over ‘net neutrality regulation it has done exactly that.

Two years ago, Google sought and got “openness” conditions from the Federal Communication Commission on the 700MHz spectrum auction. Purchasers of it can’t use it as they see fit. For fear that it will cede profits to providers of transport, Google supports public utility-style regulation for network operators. Google thinks that “openness” rules to protect its profitability are ‘good for the Internet’. But they are just seeking competitive advantage through regulation.

This extraordinary self-focus—projecting one’s own interests onto others—is mirrored in the intellectual debate about openness versus proprietary systems. As I wrote in a 2007 book review, property rights and openness advocates both think their theories “explain the world.”

In fact, Google (and the Internet) benefit from openness some of the time and “closedness” some of the time. Open is not an organizing theory for Google, and it’s not an organizing theory for the Internet—just for parts of each.

Rosenberg’s myopia—thinking that what is good for Google is good for everyone—is the same as the myopia that politicians acquire after years in office. Fawned over by special pleaders and staff, they come to believe that their interests are the public interest. They honestly—but wrongly—believe that their defeat in an election would harm the country. So it is with Google’s support for net neutrality. L’Internet, c’est moi.

If Jonathan Rosenberg and the nice folks at Google were self-aware, it would be fair to call them hypocrites. But they are unlikely to see Google’s self-serving openness ideology as simply that. In Washington, D.C. we see all the time how hard it is to get a fish to talk about water.

“Hasn’t Steve Jobs learned anything in the last 30 years?” asks Farhad Manjoo of Slate in an interesting piece about “The Cell Phone Wars” currently raging between Apple’s iPhone and the Google’s new G1, Android-based phone. Manjoo wonders if whether Steve Jobs remembers what happen the last time he closed up a platform: “because Apple closed its platform, it was IBM, Dell, HP, and especially Microsoft that reaped the benefits of Apple’s innovations.” Thus, if Jobs didn’t learn his lesson, will he now with the iPhone? Manjoo continues:

Well, maybe he has—and maybe he’s betting that these days, “openness” is overrated. For one thing, an open platform is much more technically complex than a closed one. Your Windows computer crashes more often than your Mac computer because—among many other reasons—Windows has to accommodate a wider variety of hardware. Dell’s machines use different hard drives and graphics cards and memory chips than Gateway’s, and they’re both different from Lenovo’s. The Mac OS, meanwhile, has to work on just a small range of Apple’s rigorously tested internal components—which is part of the reason it can run so smoothly. And why is your PC glutted with viruses and spyware? The same openness that makes a platform attractive to legitimate developers makes it a target for illegitimate ones.

I discussed these issues in greater detail in my essay on”Apple, Openness, and the Zittrain Thesis” and in a follow-up essay about how the Apple iPhone 2.0 was cracked in mere hours. My point in these and other essays is that the whole “open vs. closed” dichotomy is greatly overplayed. Each has its benefits and drawbacks, but there is no reason we need to make a false choice between the two for the sake of “the future of the Net” or anything like that.

In fact, the hybrid world we live in — full of a wide variety of open and proprietary platforms, networks, and solutions — presents us with the best of all worlds. As I argued in my original review of Jonathan Zittrain’s book, “Hybrid solutions often make a great deal of sense. They offer creative opportunities within certain confines in an attempt to balance openness and stability.”  It’s a sign of great progress that we now have different open vs. closed models that appeal to different types of users.  It’s a false choice to imagine that we need to choose between these various models.

Which raises a second point I always stress: There are an infinite number of points along the “open vs. closed” spectrum.  In reality, there are very few products that are perfectly “open” or “closed” out there. These are terms of art, not science.  The iPhone is becoming more “open” with each passing day.  Granted, it’s not as open as the Windows Mobile and certainly not as open as Android, but many people feel those platforms aren’t perfectly open either, or have that they have their own sets of problems.  Bottom line is, you can shop around and find the phone (and level of “openness”) that is right for you. No one is forcing you to buy an iPhone.

Third, efforts to tightly bottle up any technology or business model these days are usually doomed to fail. It’s not just the iPhone that is cracked in mere hours these days; seemingly every new gadget and service has a small army of hackers waiting to pounce when the product doesn’t do everything that consumers want it to. It’s getting harder and harder for product developers to “cripple” or limit functionality out of the gate.  They either offer it immediately or someone else we make sure it is offered for them.

Fourth and final point: The proper policy position with regards to the “open vs. closed” debate should be one of techno-agnosticism.  Lawmakers and courts should not be tilting the balance in one direction or the other.  Let the great experiment (and debate) continue.

Global handset manufacturing giant Nokia has purchased the shares they didn’t already own in Symbian, Ltd., the company formed in 1998 as a partnership among Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Psion and the developer of the Symbian mobile operating system, by far the world’s leading OS for “smart mobile” phones with 67% of the market, followed by Microsoft on 13%, with RIM on 10% (source).

But wait, there’s more (per Engadget)!

Here’s where it gets interesting, though: rather than taking Symbian’s intellectual private for Nokia’s own benefit, the goods will be turned over to the Symbian Foundation, a nonprofit whose sole goal will be the advancement of the Symbian platform in its many flavors. Motorola and Sony Ericsson have signed up to contribute UIQ assets, while NTT DoCoMo (which uses Symbian-based wares in a number of its phones) will be donating code as well. Other Symbian Foundation members include Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG, and AT&T (yep, the same AT&T that currently sells precisely one Symbian-based phone), so things could get interesting. The move clearly seems to be a preemptive strike against Google’s Open Handset Alliance, LiMo, and other collaborative efforts forming around the globe with the goal of standardizing smartphone operating systems; the writing was on the wall, and Symbian didn’t want to miss the train. Total cash outlay for the move will run Nokia roughly €264 million — about $410 million in yankee currency.

Other reports note that the Symbian Foundation will eventually take Symbian open source, and that this move is as much as response to Apple’s closed iPhone platform as it is to Gogole’s open Android and LiMo platforms.  (Although it is intriguing to note that AT&T, Apple’s exclusive U.S. partner for the iPhone, is among the backers of the new Symbian Foundation, perhaps indicating that even AT&T is hedging its bets.)

The fact that we will soon see three open source platforms (counting Google’s Android and LiMo) competing for market share provides yet another measure of the exceptionally high degree of competition in the wireless industry.  Even FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, hardly a “regulatory skeptic,” has recognized the significance of this aspect of wireless competition and widespread availability of wireless carrier choice in his recent statements indicating his intent to dismiss Skype’s Petition to impose open access requirements a la the FCC’s 1968 Carterfone decision, calling “wireless … the poster child for competition” and noting that “95 percent of the people in the U.S. can choose form at least three wireless operators competing to offer them service.”

Cumulatively, the increased competitiveness–and openness-of the wireless industry mitigates strongly against recent proposals for Carterfone-style requirements (see Tim Wu’s June 2007 piece); banning exclusive relationships between handset manufacturers and wireless carriers, as my colleague Barabara Esbin and I noted in our recent paper (PDF); heavy-handed regulation of early termination fees, as dicussed by Barbara (PDF) and other attempts to impose unnecessary regulations on an industry that is already the most competitive within the FCC’s purview and one in which open standards should facilitate continued innovation.

Nokia’s move is, in some respects, reminiscent of AOL’s 2003 decision to create the Mozilla Foundation.  If Symbian achieves even a fraction of Mozilla’s success with Firefox in growing a developer community that can build a strong product, the pace of wireless innovation could increase still further.