Dichotomies and markets :: The Future of the Internet

Dichotomies and markets

March 24th, 2008 | by admin | Published in Generativity

Adam Thierer has posted a thoughtful review of the Future of the Internet. He picks up on something that others have mentioned that I don’t realize I appear to suggest: that my distinction between sterile and generative technologies appears to be too much of a dichotomy, and that I think that only generative technologies are good ones.

I don’t mind sterile technologies in principle — I like the idea of taking the rough-hewn innovations that spring from the Internet and packaging them into cleaner, more reliable forms. I love my TiVo. (Indeed, that used to be the first sentence of the book. Then I went with the iPhone.) I even appreciate that sterile technologies can come about without having to emulate the products of generative ones — not every toaster comes from nerds experimenting with heating elements.

My worry, though, is that we’ll lose a sense of equilibrium between the generative and sterile spheres, and that the emergence of contingently generative technologies — platforms that are open to third party innovation at first, but then close off selectively — will squeeze out fully generative technologies, to the detriment of innovation and enhancement of exquisite regulatory control. This is in part because the amateur nerds that drive innovation here rarely read the fine print; teenagers will code for the Facebook, iPhone and Google platforms without thinking about the ways in which their advances can be eliminated or proprietized.

Adam’s point of view is sympathetic to markets and skeptical of government intervention. He rightly asks why the market doesn’t just solve this. For that, I point to my reply to similar questions raised to parts of FOI that have been excerpted in the Boston Review:

Will the market solve this problem? Generative technologies allow consumers to become participants: to change technologies for themselves or to adopt improvements offered by others not operating through the usual mechanisms of the firm. Whether this is a market force depends on how broadly we define the term. Is any voluntary behavior endogenous to a market? Or are only those choices that have to do with purchases? If a group of people coalesces in Central Park for a game of Ultimate Frisbee, is the market for Ultimate working its magic? The question is important because often we rely too readily on the solutions proposed by firms and government. If there’s litter in a public space, the government should fine violators and clean it up, or pay a firm to do so. But the amount of litter in a park may depend not so much on the rules against it or the schedule for cleaning, but rather on the habits and normative commitments of the people who use it.

The solutions to the generative dilemma that I find most interesting are ones that don’t assume a zero-sum tradeoff between generativity and security. If we narrow ourselves to firms offering some devices that are generative but quickly compromised, and others that are sterile or contingently generative, but incapable of generating whimsical change, the market will no doubt achieve equilibrium somewhere along the axis. Bruce Owen figures that demand will create supply and the optimal point will be achieved. But Owen’s faith in the market ignores the role that a civic instinct can play if people take shared responsibility for their own and others’ security. To do so, they will need certain tools. But those tools may not be money makers, thus the market may not produce them. If the reply is “well, yes, but someone named Jimbo was moved to produce Wikipedia, and his charity is part of the market,” then the market is circularly defined as every possible action by someone. We can contribute more to our shared public life than what results indirectly through our buying or voting.

Moreover, the market may have trouble pricing the benefits of generative platforms. Behavioral economics is beginning to confirm the conventional wisdom that people do not plan very well. This is true in the PC market where people making platform investment decisions rarely weigh the unknown as part of their thought processes. They buy the PC for email or Web surfing, and only later find that it can be used for Internet telephony. And often the platform’s buyer is not the same as the user. Much of the revolution in PC software has taken place through user adventurousness on office computers acquired by companies for other reasons. What the economists might call an “agency gap” has produced great things. The true value of generative technologies is too easily dismissed when portrayed, á la Owen, as “the extent to which end-users and their communicants may indulge the whim to customize these tools.” What’s at stake is not just setting wallpaper style on your iPhone, but the very Net generativity that has facilitated entire new markets and social relationships.

Looking back, the market produced some sterile, competing consumer networks—CompuServe, the Source, and the like. Non-market forces led production on another course—the Internet. To be sure, the Internet’s reach was greatly extended through its later commercialization, but had the Internet’s architecture been obvious enough for the market to discover it, no modest government subsidies would have been needed. Sperry Rand, IBM, and Prodigy would have easily outpaced academics in producing the technologies underlying the dot-com boom. They did not.

I imagine Adam might agree with me on not reaching too quickly to government for solutions — the question is whether some of the cooperative solutions (rather than regulatory interventions) I suggest have any traction for a market-oriented thinker.

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DMCA for the iPhone, kind of

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

Fascinating: Steven Peterson, a web developer in San Francisco, put together a handy iPhone app called Routesy that gives schedules and arrival times for Muni, the city’s public transit system. The underlying data is collected by a company called NextBus, which puts trackers on the various vehicles. Generativity at its best—the government releases some data, people turn the data into something useful.

Then a guy named Peter Orloff emailed Peterson to say that he was from NextBus Information Systems, he had all the data copyrighted, and Peterson would have to arrange some sort of revenue split if he wanted to keep offering his app. After some research, Peterson says he found that NextBus Information Systems had no real connection to NextBus and was very unlikely to own the data (although there is a dubious legal claim), so he ignored Orloff and went on selling the app. So Orloff went to Apple and demanded that they stop selling Routesy, claiming that it violated his copyrights. Apple pulled it down, and Peterson couldn’t do anything about it—although he got lots of supportive emails, and says that “It’s really heartwarming to see so many people so passionate about using public transportation.”

The thing is, though, Orloff doesn’t seem to have a valid copyright claim. Muni says the data is public and sharing is encouraged. When Eve Batey, a reporter from SF Appeal, confronted Orloff about the copyright issue, he gave a series of truly bizarre excuses. (Article headline: “Muni Arrival Data App Killer Fears Attacks From Enraged Data/Transit Fiends.”)

This actually looks similar to the DMCA notice-and-takedown regime for ISPs. Under the DMCA, copyright holders can inform an ISP that they’re hosting an infringing work, and the ISP must disable access to the site if it wants to retain a blanket-like immunity against a claim for contributory copyright infringement. The site creator can, however, send a counter-notice protesting that the copyright claim is invalid, and the ISP may then restore access to the work unless the copyright holder files a lawsuit within 14 days of the counter-notice. Although there are disagreements over the DMCA standard, which was a compromise between the ISPs’ interests and the copyright holders’ interests, is it relatively clear and workable.

Apple, I think, would do well to adopt some kind of similar standard for claims against existing apps. They certainly ought to have a way for app creators to lodge a counterclaim against protestors. Apple apps are, and will increasingly be, big business, and so people with both good and malicious intentions will be very concerned about copyright. (It doesn’t even need to just be copyright: recall the groups that rallied to get BabyShaker off the iPhone because it was incredibly tasteless.) This is just another aspect of the problem that Apple is trying to be an omnipotent gatekeeper, but without the manpower to be omniscient—to investigate each app for security, copyright, and tastefulness.

More generally, I think we’ll soon need clear standards on the rights and responsibilities of mobile carriers, hardware providers, and OS creators. Who will be given broad, ISP-like immunity, and who won’t? Mobile computing is going to be too important to have very powerful ad hoc gatekeepers with conflicting, overlapping, or unrealistic roles.

“The App World has been a bit of a trip”

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

Marcus Watkins, over at VersatileMonkey.com, has a writeup of what it was like to develop his first BlackBerry app. (BlackBerry came out with its own app store earlier this year, but it’s been strangely reticent about advertising it. BlackBerry users have long been able to get third-party apps from individual developers’ websites or websites that aggregate apps, subject to their own corporate policies if it’s not a personal device.) It’s a great read — go check it out.

A couple things struck me about this:

—The technical side of developing has gotten infinitely better since Tim Wu’s 2007 account of mass confusion and interoperability problems, but a developer is still looking at significant tradeoffs between portability and capability.

—There are plenty of stories out there about how the iPhone can turn the hobbyist developer into a millionaire after a week of work. For most developers, though, the app and its marketing will require a lot of TLC. It doesn’t sound like Watkins has been overwhelmed by the marketing responsibilities, but he has had to become savvier about the sales side of app development. A sample of his early strategy: “I did some googling and saw MobiHand [a site that collects apps] but decided it must be less popular than Handango since I hadn’t heard of it. (Not exactly bullet proof reasoning.) So, I went with Handango for my first sales.”

Still, it’s definitely easier than marketing standalone software for a PC. In that sense, the app stores are very useful, prompting innovation from people who aren’t willing to commit to developing/marketing as a full-time job.

—Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo speculated that iPhone might crush its competition by co-opting most of the development community. If the apps available for the iPhone are much better than the apps available for other smartphones, people will stick with iPhones even if another phone has better hardware. As Manjoo points out, it would be the reverse of the situation that allowed Windows PCs to dominate.

But Watkins’ story makes me think that another platform could attract developers if the owners aggressively pursued them with great technical support, more capabilities, a favorable revenue split, help with marketing, etc. If I were in charge of Palm Pre sales, I would be thinking really hard about how to get the best developers.

Breaking the 140 barrier

Twitter only allows 140 characters per tweet. The founders explain that they expected interconnection with mobile phone text messaging — SMS — from the start, and that it could be expensive to have longer tweets broken into mutiple messages when people pay per SMS. As Dom Sagolla explains:

Messages longer than 160 characters (the common SMS carrier limit) were split into multiple texts and delivered (somewhat) sequentially. There were other bugs, and a mounting SMS bill. The team decided to place a limit on the number of characters that would go out via SMS for each post. They settled on 140, in order to leave room for the username and the colon in front of the message.

Of course, 140 characters is now part of the lore and essence of Twitter. It’s as sacrosanct as McDonald’s having two arches (despite starting with only one) or a Swiss Army knife folding up. (An April Fool’s joke had the company appearing to offer “Twitter Premium” with 160 characters and 50,000 instant followers.)

But there could be good reason to stretch the limit — or allow for a slightly more nuanced set of data behind a tweet — and not just because 140 characters might cut off key information (to be sure, an Onion-ey link) and have only half a thought re-tweeted before it’s fully completed. In fact, the “retweet” — expressed as “RT @[source] [source's original tweet]” — is a great case study on why. As danah boyd et al explain, retweeting is one of several “behavioral conventions” arising from Twitter users themselves. Twitter itself does not have a special “RT” functionality; it’s just two letters that many people have come to use to say that they’re repeating something they saw elsewhere — and giving attribution for it.

With the 140 character limit, though, the “RT” and attribution have to fit too. An original tweet that’s already near the limit will have to be shortened for it to work. And if someone retweets further, the cycle continues. Danah & Co. have some great examples in their draft of ways in which that retweeting can inadvertently distort or even negate the original message.

Twitter has already shown a willingness to adopt users’ conventions. The use of @___ at the beginning of a tweet to communicate with a user became so common that it made sense for Twitter to put a special link on each user’s home Twitter page to view “@replies” from others. For retweeting, Twitter could choose not to count RT @___ against the 140 character limit. That could cause some tweets to be truncated when forwarded to SMS, or divided into two messages, which was an original reason why the limit was adopted. But that might be worth it at this point. Or, Twitter could start implementing metadata for tweets. Already it records a timestamp and source for a tweet (since people can inject tweets into the system in so many different ways, not just at twitter.com.) Retweets could become part of that metadata, not necessarily fully transmitted as part of the full message itself. That way, the 140 character limit could be maintained, but people could still follow the genealogy of an idea, right back to its source — just the way that the “in-reply-to” link on twitter.com lets someone unravel an entire conversation with just a click. And being able to lengthen a tweet in special circumstances could, if applied to URLs, also help avoid the need for the risky phenomenon of URL shorteners.

Twitter is a foundational technology. By that I don’t mean it’s (necessarily) revolutionary, just that it’s a building block. Its open APIs allow it to be baked into all sorts of other services, and like other foundational technologies — say, PC operating systems, or Internet protocol — it’s evolving comparatively slowly. Even MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia, hasn’t changed all that quickly. Too much is built on top of it, both technologically and in users’ practices, to change it hastily. So that’s one reason just to let it sit as is. But by giving a little more breathing space for attribution — to let people more readily build on others’ ideas through retweeting — Twitter could help assure an even wider spectrum of use, even if its founders didn’t happen to think it could be used so comprehensively or seriously.

Why the PC matters

One less examined piece of what’s going on in Iran this week goes beyond the use of Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms — beyond what people can do with a basic browser. And that’s the role of the humble PC — the personal computer, whether Windows, Mac, or GNU/Linux. What makes the PC so crucial is that it’s a “generative” technology, i.e. one that can be repurposed by its user at any time by simply installing new software. Without it, those in Iran wanting to get to blocked information would be mostly restricted to visiting Web sites that aren’t blocked and hoping that they can connect to those that are — the way that Twitterfall can be used to tweet even if twitter.com is blocked, or visiting an anonymizer like anonymizer.com.

Of course, those can be blocked too, and often are. Twitter’s ancillary sites are working — to the extent they still are — only because the censors have their hands full at the moment. But the PC changes the equation on both sides: within and outside of Iran.

Inside Iran, people can load new software on their PCs to try to get around blocks. Find a copy of something like the xB browser online, or modify your current browser to work with software like Tor, and you can try directing all your Web access through intermediaries that aren’t blocked. If you find one that works, all your surfing can end up unblocked. If people were using today’s mobile phones for Internet access instead of PCs, this wouldn’t be possible, because most mobile phones, even if they can hook up to a wireless Internet access point, won’t run outside code, or only run outside code approved by the vendor. (The jury’s still out on how easily one can install outside code on a phone running Google’s Android OS.)

Even more important than the options available to someone inside Iran are the options for those everywhere else. Many people have been eager to show support for those in Iran who want to evade the government clampdown on news, both in and out. Thanks to the PC they can do more than color their personal avatars green. If you have a PC and want to help, you can find instructions on how to download software that will turn your PC into a way station between Iranian citizens and the rest of the Net. Two minutes ago you were playing Quake, and now you’re donating bandwidth and computing cycles to the free movement of bits — and you can even go back to playing Quake again. And discussions are under way to reconfigure the just-released free Opera browser so it can serve as a proxy. [Update: Al Billings at Mozilla is thinking through the same questions for Firefox.]

That’s extraordinary. The computing machines we buy are descendants of the old hobbyist machines of the 1980’s, which assumed people would get them so they could tinker with them, and those vestiges turn out to be crucial at a time like this. We’re lucky to still have so many home PCs out there. Our work ones are often locked down — your neighborhood IT department would have a heart attack if it found you running a proxy server, since it would worry about the security of the corporate intranet. Most schools don’t allow their students to run new code in a computer cluster, and libraries are locked down, too. (Indeed, all three of these places typically have their own content filters installed!) Thanks to the PC, people can help forge new civic technologies — ones that succeed to the extent that people are willing to participate in them.

Perhaps soon we’ll see even more profound ways to transform access to the information grid. Researchers have been puzzling through “wireless ad hoc mesh networking,” which allows devices to connect to each other without needing an Internet Service Provider to run interference. If anyone is connected to the larger Internet, everyone else nearby — and everyone near everyone else nearby, etc. — can connect. This is the method used by the One Laptop Per Child project to allow the PCs they are sending to kids in developing countries to share data with one another even if there’s no Internet drop point available. Imagine that technology redeployed to this situation — and it can be, if someone writes or adapts the right software. Our PCs have radios in them that can talk to one another, not just to an “official” access point; you may even recall seeing others’ computers in your wi-fi access list when trying to find a way to get online while on the road. A little tweak here and there and it can start working — for school kids in Brazil, for hurricane refugees running laptops on battery power, and for citizens in Iran facing otherwise-limited Net access.

A green avatar is just the beginning — so long as we maintain our somewhat accidental ubiquitous infrastructure of generative, reprogrammable boxes, a legion of hackers ready to reprogram them to social ends, and a citizenry ready to donate some bandwidth and cycles to a good cause.

Experts say …

This blog isn’t that active — I haven’t quite figured out the right rhythm, and what should count as blogworthy enough to post. The past couple days have been active, though, with the events unfolding in Iran. I’m part of OpenNet, which tracks Internet censorship around the world, and we just released an update to our study of Internet filtering in Iran. There’s also the Herdict project, designed precisely for situations like these, so people can report filtering as it happens. And I’ve also been thinking a lot about Twitter and its cousins — how much social media is making a difference in what’s happening.

Apart from blogging I’ve been interviewed some by the media, and alas, one of the more provocative quotes — just featured by Andrew Sullivan — was to BBC and picked up by an Economist blog. It was provocative for its wince-inducing inanity and self-importance:

“It’s just too early to say but my expertise tells me what is going on is extremely interesting.”

It’s reminiscent of the classic Newsweek article ending: “The future is uncertain but one thing is clear — if things don’t get better they could certainly get a whole lot worse.”

Sigh. I think what I had in my mind was a real tension. On one hand there’s the excitement about what these new technologies are doing — such as the story of people like Austin Heap rallying people around the world to convert their laptops to proxies to help Iranians get Net — and the knowledge that we’re still in the middle of the situation and we’ll need time to really sort out what’s been happening, and how much of a difference social technologies are making. (When experts aren’t busy saying nothing, they’re often overhyping …)

I guess I’ve gotten my comeuppance for calling Twitter inane. In the meantime, I’m as glued as everyone else to what’s going on, and how many people are becoming a part of it. Go, civic technologies! My expertise tells me I should stop writing now …

About Jonathan Zittrain

Jonathan Zittrain is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School