Amazon Cracks Open the Kindle. Amazon is opening the Kindle to outside developers who can market their products in what sounds exactly like an App Store, down to the 70-30 revenue split and and light policing of apps. (One difference is that developers have to pay for wireless delivery.) It’s seeming like this is *the* model for the next few years. Speaking of which…

Computers Should Be More Like Toasters. The sale of the Apple Tablet could mark an important moment for generativity. Computers have been shrinking and phones have been growing—but the critical difference has been that anyone could still code for a computer, until now. The Tablet looks more like a computer than a phone, but will Apple will prescreen apps they way it does for the iPhone? Farhad Manjoo thinks that would be a good thing, but there are clear generativity costs.

The Splinternet means the end of the Web’s golden age. Josh Bernoff points out that, as we switch to appliancized computers and smart devices instead of PCs, the web becomes a “splinternet.” Websites show up and operate differently on each device. He thinks about how to handle this from a business and marketing perspective, advising: “Here’s what not to do: panic and try to unify things again. The shattering cannot be undone.”

Technology Changes “Outstrip” Netbooks. Meanwhile, the BBC considers the convergence among netbooks, smartphones, and tablet notebooks, and who the short- and long-term winners are likely to be.

Apple censors Dalai Lama iPhone Apps in China. An interesting look at how censorship works on iPhones in China. (The story was written pre-Google announcement, so some portions are out of date.) Apple, complying with local law, appears to be removing apps related to the Dalai Lama in the Chinese App Store, and a search for Falun Gong apps freezes the search page. On the other hand, it’s possible to access YouTube through an iPhone app, which isn’t always possible on a PC.

And in the crystal ball dep’t — from JZ’s book:

Imagine entering a café in Paris with one’s personal digital assistant or mobile phone, and being able to query: “Is there anyone on my buddy list within 100 yards? Are any of the ten closest friends of my ten closest friends within 100 yards?” Although this may sound fanciful, it could quickly become mainstream. With reputation systems already advising us on what to buy, why not have them also help us make the first cut on whom to meet, to date, to befriend? These are not difficult services to offer, and there are precursors today.

As usual, there’s an app for that… the “datecheck” app allows you to enter a name, phone number, or email address, and get information on your date. The categories are “sleaze detector” (check of criminal convictions & sex offenses), “$$$” (home ownership, etc), “interests” (gleaned from social networks), “living situation” (who they live with), and “compatibility”—although unfortunately, the “compatibility” check is still just a check of astrological signs. Now all they need is friends’ feedback rankings.

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

Joe Hewitt, Facebook’s iPhone app developer, has quit developing for the iPhone because he is “philosophically opposed” to Apple’s review policies and their tight control over their platform. But instead of hitching his wagon to Android or some other mobile platform, he’s decided to focus instead on making the mobile web as strong as it can be. He told TechCrunch:

The web is still unrestricted and free, and so I am returning to my roots as a web developer. In the long term, I would like to be able to say that I helped to make the web the best mobile platform available, rather than being part of the transition to a world where every developer must go through a middleman to get their software in the hands of users.

And he says on his blog that we can avoid a world where “the only technologies that matter” are the ones where Apple or some other gatekeeper makes decisions (however irrational or infuriating, as yet another developer has chronicled). I’m not entirely convinced that a vigorous mobile web is enough—for instance, Apple can still disable Flash on its phone, thus crippling many web apps—but it might be, and it’s a valuable complement to more open mobile platforms.

Then we have two people thinking about whether the web itself will remain free. First is Chris Messina on The Death of the URL. Messina writes from the perspective of a user experience designer, who understands why the complexity of the Internet can frighten users (“thar be dragons!”) but thinks that should be a challenge for designers, not a reason to give up on “the infinite organicity of the web” and the structures of “one of the most generative periods in history.”

Second is Tim O’Reilly on The War for the Web. He notes that Facebook and the Apple iPhone require users to play by the company’s rules to some extent, although the web still exists as a partial backstop—e.g., Google Voice is available on the web, if not as a native iPhone app. But he worries that the web itself will become less interoperable and less generative as companies with natural monopolies in one area attempt to gain control in other areas as well. Go read the whole piece; it’s worth it.

JZ argues that the PC and the internet have been the perfect combination for generativity. The internet itself could itself be a solution to the control of mobile platforms. But these pieces point out, yet again, how even that combination isn’t untouchable unless we’re constantly, actively working at it.

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

Lost in the Cloud

Cambridge, Mass.

EARLIER this month Google announced a new operating system called Chrome. It’s meant to transform personal computers and handheld devices into single-purpose windows to the Web. This is part of a larger trend: Chrome moves us further away from running code and storing our information on our own PCs toward doing everything online — also known as in “the cloud” — using whatever device is at hand.

Many people consider this development to be as sensible and inevitable as the move from answering machines to voicemail. With your stuff in the cloud, it’s not a catastrophe to lose your laptop, any more than losing your glasses would permanently destroy your vision. In addition, as more and more of our information is gathered from and shared with others — through Facebook, MySpace or Twitter — having it all online can make a lot of sense.

The cloud, however, comes with real dangers.

Some are in plain view. If you entrust your data to others, they can let you down or outright betray you. For example, if your favorite music is rented or authorized from an online subscription service rather than freely in your custody as a compact disc or an MP3 file on your hard drive, you can lose your music if you fall behind on your payments — or if the vendor goes bankrupt or loses interest in the service. Last week Amazon apparently conveyed a publisher’s change-of-heart to owners of its Kindle e-book reader: some purchasers of Orwell’s “1984” found it removed from their devices, with nothing to show for their purchase other than a refund. (Orwell would be amused.)

Worse, data stored online has less privacy protection both in practice and under the law. A hacker recently guessed the password to the personal e-mail account of a Twitter employee, and was thus able to extract the employee’s Google password. That in turn compromised a trove of Twitter’s corporate documents stored too conveniently in the cloud. Before, the bad guys usually needed to get their hands on people’s computers to see their secrets; in today’s cloud all you need is a password.

Thanks in part to the Patriot Act, the federal government has been able to demand some details of your online activities from service providers — and not to tell you about it. There have been thousands of such requests lodged since the law was passed, and the F.B.I.’s own audits have shown that there can be plenty of overreach — perhaps wholly inadvertent — in requests like these.

The cloud can be even more dangerous abroad, as it makes it much easier for authoritarian regimes to spy on their citizens. The Chinese government has used the Chinese version of Skype instant messaging software to monitor text conversations and block undesirable words and phrases. It and other authoritarian regimes routinely monitor all Internet traffic — which, except for e-commerce and banking transactions, is rarely encrypted against prying eyes.

With a little effort and political will, we could solve these problems. Companies could be required under fair practices law to allow your data to be released back to you with just a click so that you can erase your digital footprints or simply take your business (and data) elsewhere. They could also be held to the promises they make about content sold through the cloud: If they sell you an e-book, they can’t take it back or make it less functional later. To increase security, companies that keep their data in the cloud could adopt safer Internet communications and password practices, including the use of biometrics like fingerprints to validate identity.

And some governments can be persuaded — or perhaps required by their independent judiciaries — to treat data entrusted to the cloud with the same level of privacy protection as data held personally. The Supreme Court declared in 1961 that a police search of a rented house for a whiskey still was a violation of the Fourth Amendment privacy rights of the tenant, even though the landlord had given permission for the search. Information stored in the cloud deserves similar safeguards.

But the most difficult challenge — both to grasp and to solve — of the cloud is its effect on our freedom to innovate. The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you — and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy. Microsoft might want you to run Word and Internet Explorer, but those had better be good products or you’ll switch with a few mouse clicks to OpenOffice orFirefox.

Promoting competition is only the tip of the iceberg — there are also the thousands of applications so novel that they don’t yet compete with anything. These tend to be produced by tinkerers and hackers. Instant messaging, peer-to-peer file sharing and the Web itself all exist thanks to people out in left field, often writing for fun rather than money, who are able to tempt the rest of us to try out what they’ve done.

This freedom is at risk in the cloud, where the vendor of a platform has much more control over whether and how to let others write new software. Facebook allows outsiders to add functionality to the site but reserves the right to change that policy at any time, to charge a fee for applications, or to de-emphasize or eliminate apps that court controversy or that they simply don’t like. The iPhone’s outside apps act much more as if they’re in the cloud than on your phone: Apple can decide who gets to write code for your phone and which of those offerings will be allowed to run. The company has used this power in ways that Bill Gates never dreamed of when he was the king of Windows: Apple is reported to have censored e-book apps that contain controversial content, eliminated games with political overtones, and blocked uses for the phone that compete with the company’s products.

The market is churning through these issues. Amazon is offering a generic cloud-computing infrastructure so anyone can set up new software on a new Web site without gatekeeping by the likes of Facebook. Google’s Android platform is being used in a new generation of mobile phones with fewer restrictions on outside code. But the dynamics here are complicated. When we vest our activities and identities in one place in the cloud, it takes a lot of dissatisfaction for us to move. And many software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple.

If the market settles into a handful of gated cloud communities whose proprietors control the availability of new code, the time may come to ensure that their platforms do not discriminate. Such a demand could take many forms, from an outright regulatory requirement to a more subtle set of incentives — tax breaks or liability relief — that nudge companies to maintain the kind of openness that earlier allowed them a level playing field on which they could lure users from competing, mighty incumbents.

We’ve only just begun to measure this problem, even as we fly directly into the cloud. That’s not a reason to turn around. But we must make sure the cloud does not hinder the creation of revolutionary software that, like the Web itself, can seem esoteric at first but utterly necessary later.

Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard, is the author of “The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It.”

Google and Microsoft are now officially fighting over you. They are vying not merely for your momentary attention—that rare instant when your precious eyeballs stray to an ad, motivating you to click on it and cause a penny or a nickel to fall into their jars. They want a long-term relationship with you, and each thinks its future depends on it.

Google made its boldest bid in this direction this week with the announcement of its new operating system, Chrome. Soon you will be able to buy a PC or other device loaded with Chrome instead of Windows. By Google’s account, Chrome will serve a single essential purpose: to get your computer up and running with a Web browser —confusingly also called Chrome—seconds after you’ve turned it on. Now you’ll be greeted each day by Google instead of Microsoft. Just as all those years ago Microsoft Windows pointed you toward Microsoft’s other products, Google’s browser will likely naturally angle you toward Google’s ever-expanding family of Web products.

If the plan succeeds and lots of people snap up Chrome instead of Windows, it will cement the idea that software is now meant to run out there “in the cloud,” far away from the PC or PDA in front of you. You’ll need an Internet connection to do most things—and to be sure, that’s much easier to find in 2009 than it was in 1995. The question is, in the era of the cloud, how do we avoid sacrificing our essential computing freedoms?

The issue arises because Google aspires to be not only the index of your information, but also the repository. As Google Mail seamlessly interacts with Google Docs and Spreadsheets (the whole service is called Google Apps), you might find yourself spending most of your time not simply on the Web, but at Google.com or its partners. Google could be as dominating a presence in the cloud era as Microsoft has been in the PC era.

Google’s announcement is a milestone within a long transition from the PC to the Web. For about two decades, an overwhelming majority of computer users were greeted by Microsoft’s Windows startup screen and chime. Microsoft collected fees for the basic software that ran your PC, and then again by selling application software such as word processors and spreadsheets. Software developers would write new software for Windows since that’s where the users were, and users would keep buying Windows since that’s where the software was. As the Web took off in the late 1990s, the browser began to disturb this arrangement. Netscape got the idea of bundling software called Java with its browser, which made it powerful enough to take on word processing, spreadsheets, and many other things.

Google is now on the verge of finishing what Netscape started. So far, Google hasn’t fully figured out its business model. Instead of charging you the way Microsoft did for Windows and Office, perhaps Google will stick with ads, hoping you’ll occasionally click on something. Or perhaps, serving as the hub of your online identity, Google can help you spend your money on other sites, taking a cut the way your credit-card company does from a merchant when you make a purchase. Or perhaps Google will charge developers for the privilege of running their software on the Google Apps platform, or even to run it elsewhere but drawing upon Google resources—the way that a restaurant’s Web site might help you find the place by embedding an interactive Google map on one of its pages.

Although no one can predict Chrome’s future, the Web relentlessly pulls us, and our data in. Unless we come up with ways of protecting ourselves now, our data could be shaped and used in ways we haven’t imagined and that are beyond our control. We could find it hard to switch from one service provider to another after piling up so much information, and so many relationships, in one place. We ought to be able to move our data, with just a click, from one gated community to another—from, say, Microsoft’s Office Live, its suite of Web-based software, to Google Apps. We ought to be able to bridge our identities from one place to another, instead of having to choose just one. Why shouldn’t our Google Docs be permanently accessible through Office Live and vice versa, and on to some upstart site that no one’s heard of? Market forces may naturally take care of this—but they are not magic, and a little bit of well-crafted regulation (or the threat of it) can help maintain a competitive marketplace.

Freedom for you is one half of the puzzle. The other half is freedom for those who write software. Even in a world mostly of Windows, there are thousands of different pieces of software that can be found, and Bill Gates has had nothing to say about whether they would be allowed to run on his platform. We ought to preserve similar freedoms in a new world where Web platforms can and do shut down outside software all the time, whether on the Facebook platform or Google Apps. This might come about through software authors uniting to temper some of the practices that give Web-platform makers much more control over outside software than Microsoft ever had for its desktops, or again, through narrow regulation to ensure nondiscriminatory accessibility to these platforms—especially if one platform outgrows the rest.

Long-term relationships can be extremely valuable and healthy; it makes sense to get new and promising ones off on the right foot.

Our OpenNet overview of the Internet in Iran dates from 2005, but it’s still largely true.  (An update is in the works.)  Iran has been able to impose a finely grained Internet filtering regime, not having to deal with the sheer volume of traffic that, say, China has.  It’s able to treat its Internet-using public the way a school can filter what its kids see on their PCs.  All Internet traffic is routed through a server farm that applies the filtering.  (The government used to run U.S. company Secure Computing’s (since acquired by McAfee) SmartFilter software.  Secure Computing denied selling the software to Iran; see Wikipedia’s summary.  Today Iran runs its own home-grown filtering software.)

So it’d be trivial for the Iranian government to block access to Twitter as it could to any particular Web site, and it could even block access to some Twitter users’ feeds there while leaving others open, by simply configuring its filters to allow some Twitter urls through while filtering others.  But Twitter isn’t just any particular Web site.  It’s an atom designed to be built into other molecules.  More than most, Twitter allows multiple paths in and out for data.  Its open APIs make it trivially easy for any other Web service provider to insert a stream of tweets in or to capture what comes out.  Thus Twitterfall can provide a waterfall of tweets — all viewable by going there instead of to Twitter.  Anyone using at Twitterfall can tweet from there as well.  You can hook up your Facebook status in either direction, so that when you tweet it automatically updates your Facebook status — or the other way around.

The very fact that Twitter itself is half-baked, coupled with its designers’ willingness to let anyone build on top of it to finish baking it (I suppose it helps not to have any apparent business model that relies on drawing people to the actual Twitter Web site), is what makes it so powerful.  There’s no easy signature for a tweet-in-progress if its shorn of a direct connection to the servers at twitter.com.  And with so many ways to get those tweets there and back without the user needing twitter.com, it’s far more naturally censorship resistant than most other Web sites.

Less really is more.

Publius points out that Iran could simply cut off all Internet access, or at least all access for most people there.  Maybe it’ll come to that.

I’ve recently written a book about the Future of the Internet (the
paperback version comes out this week).  The argument it makes has a lot
of moving pieces.  One of the first is that the global network we use
offers a fabulous (and by no means necessary) sort of openness, a
“generative” quality that has allowed innovation from many corners and
from people with nicely varying motivations.  So too what has
traditionally been the most common device attached to it: the personal
computer.  Give a PC code and it will run the code.  This basic fact –
so easy to take for granted — is part of what allowed the Internet
revolution.  It meant, for example, that academics could write the first
Web browsers without having to persuade some skeptical gatekeeper of
their virtues.  (Compare with thinking of a new feature you think would
work well on, say, an Amazon Kindle.  Send in a comment card?)

But this openness also creates a special kind of vulnerability,
especially as a generative system goes mainstream.  Lots of people have
PCs without knowing the first thing about the code running on them.  Run
the wrong code and your machine is hijacked — a zombie that can attack
others, disgorge its owner’s personal data, or self-destruct.  And
running code is as simple as a few clicks on or near an icon somewhere
on a Web page.

Without a good defense strategy — one that tries to preserve the core
openness of the Net while still meeting the threat — we’ll see bad
defense strategies.  This is especially so if a worm like the
currently-circulating “Conficker” decides to wreak havoc on the millions
of machines it has compromised (and which silently await further
instructions), and people panic.  One of those bad (but still
rational) strategies is to lock down the PC or abandon it entirely in
favor of locked-down information appliances like Kindle, or hybrid
devices like the iPhone — which allow outside code but only with the
approval of the platform vendor.  We see this in many corporate
environments, K-12 computer labs, libraries, and cyber cafes: PCs that
can only run the software pre-installed by the IT department.  If Skype
isn’t already there, you can’t get it up and running.  Many places even
have Internet or Web filters: certain sites are placed off-limits.

So I’m curious: how much have university environments, normally more
freewheeling, either thanks to ideological commitment or because a lack
of funding makes it hard to hire an obsessive-compulsive IT staff,
started to lock themselves down?  From where you stand (well, type), are
you able to install whatever you want and answer to no one for it?

As the problem of viruses, spyware, and other forms of “badware” increase, so has the the need for a central place where people with no prior knowledge about badware and its effects could go to ask questions and get assistance on the topic. BadwareBusters.org aims to fill that gap by attracting a community consisting of everyone from computer novices to technology experts. Users can browse, search, join, and start conversation topics and to rate other users’ contributions. A reputation and rating system helps people identify the most useful topics and the most helpful users.

-Yvette Wohn

Suppose that we agree on a rough (to some, controversial) value judgment: the Internet’s architectural openness (its “generativity”) — and its progression into the mainstream — has been a genuinely awesome thing, facilitating radical (and mostly good) revolutions in how we express and entertain ourselves, how we learn, how we shop, essentially in how meaning is made. 

Then: is there a signal threat to it apart from the ones arising from people (and regulators) who reject or are harmed by the Net’s openness even when it’s functioning as designed?  I.e., apart from those who don’t share the value judgment about openness?

I gather that some say no.  David Akin and David Isenberg, and perhaps Gene S. (although he sort of seems to say “a pox on both your houses”), say that for all its vulnerabilities, the Internet manages to keep on ticking, and suggestions that there is a growing — perhaps existential — threat to its functioning arising from anti-libertarian control freaks and mercenary security vendors — those who benefit from rejecting its generative premise rather than those who want to save it.

I say yes.  It’s an tough empirical question and there is plenty of room for disagreement — much of this is crystal ball gazing — but it clouds the ball further to argue that anyone who tries to describe the threat is only doing so because he or she seeks lockdown.  I worry both about the problem that will, if no better alternatives are offered, drive people away from open systems, and life in the gated communities that will welcome them.

So what’s the problem?  As Gene says, the issue is not only with networks that are not secure, but also the endpoints: reprogrammable machines, PCs, that provide the basis for the botnets that can wreak various forms of havoc.  It’s a miracle and an absurdity that infused in homes, workplaces, and laps around the world are PCs that can be repurposed in an instant, running code from the other side of the world without the vendor of the machine or its operating system, or the network service provider, having anything to say about it.  That’s how an innovation like Skype — or, for that matter, a Web browser — can come about and hit prime time.  It’s also how worms and viruses spread, and it’s not just about OS bugs: many of these come in through the front door, with the user choosing to run new code without understanding what’s hidden within it.  I remember Microsoft’s “first immutable law of security“:

There’s a nice analogy between running a program and eating a sandwich. If a stranger walked up to you and handed you a sandwich, would you eat it? Probably not. How about if your best friend gave you a sandwich? Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn’t — it depends on whether she made it or found it lying in the street. Apply the same critical thought to a program that you would to a sandwich, and you’ll usually be safe.”

This is well intentioned, of course — we know what the author is trying to say by it — but it’s also crazy.  Millions of years of evolution have helped us intuitively discern a good sandwich from a rotten one, and we don’t continually ingest little bits of food every few minutes as we walk down the street.  There’s no such help with code.  That’s why for 99.9% of the people out there, the idea of merrily running any code they see is already a fiction.  (Most of the .1% are people who just don’t care if their PCs melt, rather than geeks who know how to secure them.)  People turn to anti-virus vendors, firewall makers, and all the other patchy tech that Gene rightly dismisses as baling wire and twine.  If that’s all they’ve got, people will be ripe for persuasion that they should lock themselves down more, opting for sterile environments like the Kindle for more and more tasks, or hybrid environments like that of the iPhone or Facebook Apps: outside code can run, but only with the prospective and ongoing  permission of the platform operator.  These are attractive solutions — I love my iPhone — but they are worrisome in the big picture, especially as the model for them begins to predominate across all software.  Already, many of the otherwise-generative machines out there are being locked down by the boxes’ actual owners: PCs in corporate environments, schools, cyber cafes, and libraries are frequently unable to run new code without bureaucratized approval.  And in the developing world, much of the excitement around the adoption of mobile platforms instead of clunky PCs tends, with a few notable exceptions, to play into the walled gardens.  Where demand goes, supply follows: for the next generation of geeks and tinkerers, many find these walled gardens to be an unremarkable feature of the landscape.  Today’s kidz are coding for Facebook and iPhone, not for GNU/Linux or Windows.

It’s not much answer to say: “Well, *I* don’t have problems with viruses; it’s just losers who don’t know how to protect their machines.  Let them have a playpen, then.”  This response reminds me of the end of Atlas Shrugged, when the handful of good capitalists retreat to a golden valley and mow each others’ lawns in a new economy, while the rest of the world melts.  I don’t want an Internet where only the nerds remain.  (USENET was fun, but …)

So, David’s subject line sounds right to me: “Fixing the Internet might break it worse than it’s broken now.”  But that doesn’t mean that we should accept the status quo.  If we do, we’ll lose it — or we’ll find that we’re one of a comparative handful clinging to it as everyone else migrates away.

What are the solutions that aren’t iatrogenic?  I’m less sanguine than many on this list that some sort of liability regime for buggy code is the way to go, both because I think it will in many cases lead to less generative platforms and because the problem transcends mere bugs in code.  (For a more detailed treatment of this, see <http://yupnet.org/zittrain/archives/18#29>.) And “more training” for users would be great, but seems unrealistic.  We need solutions that require only a critical mass of people to implement, rather than counting on lots and lots of people to suddenly become tinkerers themselves — even as they rightly should enjoy the benefits of an experimentalist culture like that of the Internet and PC.  My own ideas run less in the direction of re-architecting the entire Internet, though I’m intrigued by the Clean Slate project and its siblings, like that run by David Clark at MIT.  David Isenberg is right that I’ve suggested some promise in virtual machine technology that allows promising but suspect code to run in a “red” zone, but this approach also has limits and drawbacks.  (Who decides what’s red and green when the users’ cluelessness is what gives rise to the need for a red zone at all?)  See, e.g., <http://yupnet.org/zittrain/archives/18#6>.

Instead, I think that collecting and making available more data about the shape of the problem can help enormously.  We really don’t know what’s going on out there, and the sooner we can replace speculation with reality — and not have what little we know be a trade secret! — the better.  See <http://yupnet.org/zittrain/archives/18#48> for more details on how this could work:

Social problems can be met first with social solutions — aided by powerful technical tools — rather than by resorting to law. As we have seen, vandalism, copyright infringement, and lies on Wikipedia are typically solved not by declaring that vandals are breaking laws against “exceeding authorized access” to Wikipedia or by suits for infringement or defamation, but rather through a community process that, astoundingly, has impact.

The Google/Stopbadware partnership — which made news a few weeks ago for reasons unrelated to its core operations — is one experiment in this area.  I’m all for the Net solving its own problems — someone does always tend to step up.  (E.g., thanks, Luis von Ahn, for the CAPTCHA!)  Maybe that someone is among us?

There, now, I’ve gone ahead and ended with the thought that we are the change we’ve been waiting for.  Or is it Ready to Lead? …JZ

The downloading takes place over an “EVDO modem with fallback to 1xRTT; utilizes Amazon Whispernet to provide U.S wireless coverage via Sprint’s 3G high-speed data network.”[1]  The connectivity needed to download books and browsing certain other sites is free of charge: “The Kindle Store enables you to download, display and use on your Device a variety of digitized electronic content, such as books, subscriptions to magazines, newspapers, journals and other periodicals, blogs, RSS feeds, and other digital content, [*]as determined by Amazon from time to time[*].”[2]  … “Amazon provides wireless connectivity free of charge to you for certain content shopping and downloading services on your Device. You may be charged a fee for wireless connectivity for your use of other wireless services on your Device, such as Web browsing and downloading of personal files, should you elect to use those services.”[3]  So there appears to be a more generic Web browser — how locked down it is I’m not sure, but the overall platform does not allow third party apps, and I wonder if it even allows things like Flash — and Amazon will charge fees TBD for going outside the sandbox.

Suppose that Amazon does indeed get to (1) choose what Web sites its users can visit or (2) choose what Web sites will incur a wireless access fee (to the user).  I’m curious whether people think either practice should be banned or limited by regulation, e.g. as a violation of network neutrality.  If a standard ISP did this, would it be a problem?  Does the fact that Amazon is both ISP and hardware provider make the situation better or worse?  At some level a specialized device won’t substitute for “standard” Net access and one wouldn’t complain about limitations, any more than one complains that standard cable TV service doesn’t allow Web surfing, even if the set top box can tune to a handful of specialized Web site front ends for “enhanced” content.  (In fact, some televisions themselves now do this, along with Blu-Ray disc players.)  On the other hand, it’s clearly a platform convergent with everything else — one could imagine bringing only a Kindle on a trip and managing web and primitive email access from it.

I think we’ll be faced with more and more of these hybrid Internet appliances.  I’m worried about the end of the ethos of the mainstream hobbyist PC — defined as the general public being able to define what code they want to run, without interference or undue shaping by gatekeepers — and see appliances (and managed web services like the Facebook and Google apps platforms) as substitutes rather than complements.

Some of you may know that the FCC is auctioning off the 2155-2175 MHz (AWS-3) band of spectrum later next month, which could open up a whole host of new wireless technologies to consumers. Right now the commission is considering a number of public-interest requirements for the eventual winner of the auction to fulfill, among them:

(1) that the winner must allocate 25% of the spectrum for free, family-here wireless Internet
(2) that the winner must build the network to be accessible to 95% of Americans within ten years

Now, I’ve got a few concerns about these proposals. In fact, I’ve blogged some of those concerns at the Open Net Initiative. But what I don’t have any concerns about, and what I vigorously support, is the idea of some public interest provisions to be mandated for the spectrum winner.

Yet apparently, the Bush administration does have problems – problems with the very idea of public interest provisions. In a recent letter to Congress, the acting head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) wrote that:

“Auctions without price or product mandates create a level playing field…Restrictions and conditions on spectrum use, however well intentioned, are not the most effective or efficient way to encourage development of services or to assist underserved areas.”

Now, I don’t want to be facetious, but saying that “auctions without price or product mandates create a level playing field,” is a little like saying “anarchy creates a level playing field.” If there are no rules or restrictions, of course the playing field is fair, in so far as the strongest or richest player wins. But is that always what we want in a spectrum auction? Is our goal really to have the strongest or richest player win? As a matter of law, we can’t: federal law prohibits regulators from considering revenues when designing spectrum auctions. And as a matter of public policy, we shouldn’t: from aerospace to the Intenret, the government has often played a role in designing innovative environments. What troubles me about a condition-less wireless auction is that we might make a lot of money in the short-term, but at the price of innovation in the long-term.