Jerry Brito

Does the EFF favor government regulation of computer manufacturers?

You won’t find the words ‘government’ or ‘regulation’ in this post at EFF’s blog by Micah Lee and Peter Eckersley. They’re just appealing to Apple’s better angels to drop its closed ways. I’ve explained before why that’s a rational thing to do. But will the EFF assure supporters like me that it will never endorse government enforcement of a “bill of rights” like the one Lee and Eckersley propose today?

What I like about EFF is that it is a pro-liberty group, but I hope I’m not wrong in assuming that they view liberty as I do: as a negative concept. They never come out and say it, but it sure sounds like the authors believe that if Apple doesn’t come around to seeing the virtues of openness and provide an escape hatch, then maybe they should be forced to. I get that impression from passages like this:

When technology and phone companies defend the restrictions that they are imposing on their customers, the most frequent defense they offer is that it’s actually in their customers’ interest to be deprived of liberty: “If we let people do what they want with their pocket computers, they will do stupid things with them. You will be safer and happier in our walled compound than you would be outside.”

Imposing on their customers? Seems to me like the vast majority of Apple’s customers are choosing these restrictions. It’s not Apple that thinks its customers are stupid, and is therefore “imposing” a locked phone on them, it’s Lee and Eckersley who seem to have a low regard for customers’ preferences and want to impose an open device on them.

We can of course debate whether customers are being short-sighted in the choice they’re making, whether the benefits of closed platforms outweigh the costs, and whether we have the best of both worlds right now, but you can’t say that customers are being “deprived of their liberty.” What liberty are they being deprived of? Does the EFF believe there is a positive right to mobile computers that run arbitrary code?

I repeat my plea: Can EFF assure us that it will not support government regulation of computer manufacturers?

A little sympathy for Mike Daisey, and a silver lining, too

The revelation that the story Mike Daisey told This American Life (and anyone who would listen) is not true, reminds me of the recent literary hit, “The Lifespan of a Fact.” It’s a meta-conversation between a fabulist journalist and his fact-checker about a non-fiction essay that’s not completely accurate. The first sentence conflates several events as having happened on the same day, and as a New York Times review explains:

D’Agata’s response to these discrepancies, as Fingal kindly calls them at first, is basically: Who cares? It sounds better to say that all these events happened on the same day than it would to hobble the opener with lumpy qualifiers. “The facts that are being employed here aren’t meant to function baldly as ‘facts.’ The work that they’re doing is more image-based than informational.”

Which seems to me to be exactly what’s happened with Daisey. As Rob Schmitz, who uncovered Daisey’s fabrications, writes,

What makes this a little complicated is that the things Daisey lied about seeing are things that have actually happened in China: Workers making Apple products have been poisoned by Hexane. Apple’s own audits show (PDF) the company has caught underage workers at a handful of its suppliers. These things are rare, but together, they form an easy-to-understand narrative about Apple.

An easy-to-understand narrative is also what we got from Invisible Children, and it catapulted their woefully inaccurate video to a 100 million views. But it was clear all along—or it should have been to any intelligent person—that the Kony 2012 video was a piece of propaganda. Until This American Life gave Daisey’s story its imprimatur, propaganda is hopefully how intelligent people saw Daisey’s one-man show.

So I actually feel sympathetic for Daisey when he says, “My mistake, the mistake I truly regret, is that I had it on your show as journalism, and it’s not journalism. It’s theater” Of course, sympathy won’t get you excused. Once he started working with journalists, Daisey should have known the standards of theater or propaganda no longer applied.

What is heartening to me is that he was caught and exposed. Even as the precautionary and prophylactic practices of our journalistic institutions sometimes fail, the reality of our globalized and networked world mean that factual mistakes won’t last for too long. In another era, Daisey’s account would have gone down in history as truth. Today too many people are watching, and they have an incentive to debunk and cheap access to all the tools to do it. Silver lining found.

The Internet’s philosopher-king

The cover story of this week’s The New Republic is a review by Evgeny Morozov of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. In 10,000 words it is more illuminating about what made Steve Jobs tick than Isaacson’s 656 pages of warmed-over anecdotes and Wikipedia glosses. Morozov gets it right when he draws the connection between Bauhaus and Apple—functionalism and simplicity über alles. But he doesn’t seem to like where this takes Apple or Jobs.

He calls Jobs’s adherence to the Bauhaus ideal “a kind of industrial Platonism” in which products have a true form or essence that must be discovered and revealed by a designer. What consumers think they want is irrelevant; they will know what they want when it is presented to them. That’s true as far as it goes, but Morozov is the real Platonist here.

Morozov’s ultimate indictment of Apple is that it refuses to consider the externalities its technologies impose on “society.” One may love one’s Apple products and how they have improved one’s life, but, Morozov says,

We need to identify the other moral instructions that may be embedded in a technology, which it promotes directly or indirectly. And this fuller analysis requires going beyond studying the immediate impact on the user and engaging with the broader—let us call it the “ecological”—impact of a device. (“Ecological” here has no environmental connotations; it simply indicates that a technology may affect not only its producer and its user, but also the values and the habits of the community in which they live.)

What is this negative externality Apple’s technology is inflicting on the value and habits of our communities? It’s that apps will kill the open Internet, except not for the reasons we think. Morozov cites and dismisses Jonathan Zittrain’s “generativity” critique saying that Zittrain is concerned only with the threat to innovation. Morozov, on the other hand, is concerned with loftier “ethical and aesthetic considerations.” Namely, that Apple’s app paradigm “may be destroying the Internet in much the same way that the automobile destroyed the sidewalks and the playgrounds.”

The point is not that we should forever cling to the shape and the format of the Internet as it exists today. It is that we should (to borrow Apple’s favorite phrase) “think different” and pay attention to the aesthetic and civic externalities of the app economy. Our choice is between erecting a virtual Portland or sleepwalking into a virtual Dallas. But Apple under Steve Jobs consistently refused to recognize that there is something valuable to the Web that it may be destroying.

After reading a competing cover story about Portland in another newsweekly, I’m not sure the choice is as clear as Morozov thinks it is. But the message is clear: like Portland’s planners do about a “livable city,” Morozov has a vision of what is the Internet’s pure form, and it’s not one left to messy markets.

Morozov quotes a Newsweek interview with Jobs just a few years after the Web was invented. Jobs sees it as “the ultimate direct-to-customer distribution channel.” He essentially predicts that you’ll be able to buy books online and that the bookstore will know what you like.

That the Web did become a shopping mall fifteen years after Jobs made his remark does not mean that he got the Web right. It means only that a powerful technology company that wants to change the Web as it pleases can currently do so with little or no resistance from anyone. If one day Apple decides to remove a built-in browser from the iPad, as the Web becomes less necessary in an apped world, it will not be because things took on a life of their own, but because Apple refused to investigate what other possible directions—or forms of life—“things” might have taken. For Jobs, with his pre-political mind, there was no other way to think about the Internet than to rely on the tired binary poles of supply and demand.

The notion that Apple turned the web into what it is today singlehandedly is laughable. Apple was moribund until 2000, didn’t introduce the iTunes Store until 2003, and has never had a strong presence on the web. The web has become what it is today because the convenience of getting any book you want, whenever you want it, and cheaply beats little bookstores stocked by proprietor’s whims, however aesthetically pleasing they may be—which they’re often not. And for the record, I hope we can all agree the web is more than a shopping mall.

More to the point, though, Jobs was not as much a Pied Piper as we’d like to think he was. Depite all his marketing moxie, he was constrained by the market. If Jobs ever thought there was a true essence of a computer, it was the Power Mac G4 Cube. As Isaacson says, “it was the pure expression of Jobs’s aesthetic.” And it was a flop. “Jobs later admitted that he had overdesigned and overpriced the Cube, just as he had the NeXT computer.” Remember the NeXT cube? How about the iPod Hi-Fi? The buttonless iPod shuffle? Ping? Those tired poles of supply and demand told Jobs “no” time after time, but we might just as easily dismiss gravity or entropy as tired.

If Apple were to remove the browser from the iPad today, there would be, shall we say, less demand for the tablet. If at some future date there is no more demand for a web browser, and Apple removes it to little fanfare, then what is the harm?

I guess it is some Platonic Internet that we’d lose. A pure internet that we don’t know we want. One that only philosopher-kings can see. One they will discuss at “Berlin-based think tanks” and in the pages of “quarterly magazines,” as Morozov praises Google for sponsoring. And it’s an Internet the philosopher-kings would plan for us the same way Neil Goldschmidt and his friends planned Portland.

No thanks. I prefer a Steve Jobs, pursuing a functionalist ideal with little care for the consequences, yet checked by those tired poles and the “perennial gale of creative destruction” that will someday catch up with Apple.

Turns out Apple’s walled garden susceptible to market pressure and political pressure

A couple of news items this week have vindicated some opinions I’d previously expressed here, and they’re all about Apple, so how can I can pass up the opportunity to note them, right?

A while back I wrote that as long as iOS devices had a standards-compliant browser, innovation would be safe:

Apple has come under fire by some supporters of an open internet and open software platforms such as Jonathan Zittrain and Tim Wu, who argue that Apple’s walled garden approach to devices and software will lead us to a more controlled and less innovative world. In particular, they point to the app store and Apple’s zealous control over what apps consumers are allowed to purchase and run on their devices. Here’s the thing, though: Every Apple device comes with a web browser. A web browser is an escape hatch from Apple’s walled garden. And Apple has taken a backseat to no one in nurturing an open web.

This week comes word that the Financial Times, unhappy with having to give Apple a 30% cut of it’s subscription revenues, has dropped its iOS app in favor of a web app. Read the story; it’s quite interesting. As far as I can tell, the web app, written in cutting edge HTML5, is as good as the native app.

The second piece of news is that Apple has quietly backed down from its controversial requirement that an in-app newspaper or magazine subscription be the “same price or less than it is offered outside the app”. “Apple also removed the requirement that external subscriptions must be also offered as an in-app purchase.”

What this tells me is that the market works, and when companies make boneheaded moves, they can’t force users or publishers to go along with it by sheer will. Back when the subscription issue was blowing up I wrote that Apple did not have the market power to make this stick:

Digital publishing is very much a contestable market. I hardly need to point out that the day after Apple’s announcement, Google made public its own very competitive subscription service. And while the iPad is ahead of the game right now, Android tablets are only now beginning to hit the market. If declining iPhone market share is any indication, Android will nip at Apple’s heels in the tablet space as well. And let’s not forget other formidable (and somewhat-formidable) competitors in the likes of HP’s WebOS, Microsoft-Nokia, and RIM.

Let’s now talk about the real threat to app innovation. There’s news today that Apple has finally caved in to political pressure from members of Congress and banned DUI checkpoint apps from the app store. RIM had already complied, and Google has yet to respond. You can see, though, how apps are more susceptible to nanny state meddling than to monopolization.

FTC to probe Apple for in-app purchases?

The Washington Post’s Cecilia Kang reports that the FTC will probe Apple for in-app purchases marketing practices. According to Kang,

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz wrote in a letter to Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) that the practice of “in-app purchases” for certain applications on Apple iPhones, iPads and iPods raised concerns that consumers may not fully understand the ramifications of those charges. The Washington Post wrote about hefty charges amassed by children using Apple device games that public interest groups said should not be included in software geared for children. Some parents said their children didn’t understand the difference between real and pretend purchases for items such as $99 barrels of Smurfberries on the Capcom Interactive game Smurfs Village.

I’ll skip the question of whether it’s the proper role of the federal government to be a surrogate parent to children given iPhones by their real parents. Instead I’ll simply say that I don’t know how much easier we can expect Apple to make it for parents to supervise their children.

• Passwords All purchases on iOS devices require the user to enter a password before it can be completed. Don’t give your child the password and you don’t have to worry about charges.

• Allowances If you do want to allow your child to make purchases, but what to set some limits, Apple makes it easy to create an iTunes allowance account that allows a parent to specify an amount that is added to a child’s account each month. Once the child uses the amount, he can’t spend any more.

What more do we want Apple to do?

Is Apple’s digital subscription plan good or bad for consumers?

There has been much hand wringing about Apple’s new in-app subscription system for publishers and even one report that antitrust enforcers have begun looking into the matter.

The purpose of the antitrust laws is to protect consumers, not companies, so the simple fact that Apple will take a 30% cut from publishers who want to offer subscriptions on iOS devices should not be enough to trigger scrutiny. So, my guess at what a theory of consumer harm against Apple might be is this: Apple not only takes a 30% cut of any subscription purchased in-app on an iOS device, it also requires publishers to offer as low a price on iOS as they offer anywhere else. Therefore, a case could be made that a publisher faced with Apple’s 30% fee (and unable to simply raise prices by 30% just on Apple’s devices) might raise prices on all platforms enough to cover Apple’s cut. So, assuming market power of course, Apple’s new policy could affect all digital subscription pricing.

Yet it’s hard to talk about market power in such a nascent sector. Digital subscriptions didn’t exist 5 years ago, and they do now in large part thanks to Apple. The right market structure is sorting itself out right now and yes, Apple does seem to have a well-earned lead as the innovator in the space. But if the original Mac taught us anything, is that a lead in a nascent sector is no guarantee of monopoly and regulators would be creating serious disincentives to innovation if they meddle.

Digital publishing is very much a contestable market. I hardly need to point out that the day after Apple’s announcement, Google made public its own very competitive subscription service. And while the iPad is ahead of the game right now, Android tablets are only now beginning to hit the market. If declining iPhone market share is any indication, Android will nip at Apple’s heels in the tablet space as well. And let’s not forget other formidable (and somewhat-formidable) competitors in the likes of HP’s WebOS, Microsoft-Nokia, and RIM.

Moreover, while the consumer harm is speculative, the potential consumer benefits of Apple’s subscription service are pretty clear:

• Ease of Use & Security: Apple’s app store is a tremendous innovation if nothing else because it creates a simple payment system consumers trust. iPad users will tell you they much prefer one-click subscriptions managed through Apple than having to create many accounts with disparate publishers, which incidentally improves security.
• Privacy: One thing that sets Google’s offering apart from Apple’s is that they will share with publishers information about subscribers. Apple, on the other hand, gives users the choice of sharing information with publishers, and then it’s only limited information. This should please privacy conscious consumers.
• Subsidized Devices: As a recently viral article in Wired suggests, the reason Apple is able to offer the iPad entry price of $500 (which rivals are having a hard time meeting) is that Apple is a vertically integrated company. This means that the 30% from subscriptions potentially subsidizes the iPad’s low price, thus benefitting consumers.

How closed is Apple anyway?

Anyone who knows me will attest to my status as an Apple fanboy. (I type this on my new 11” MacBook Air, which I managed to resist purchasing for a full week after it was announced.) Hopefully they’ll also attest to my ability to put consumer preference aside when considering logical arguments because today I want to suggest to you that Apple’s business strategy is good for the open internet.

Apple has come under fire by some supporters of an open internet and open software platforms such as Jonathan Zittrain and Tim Wu, who argue that Apple’s walled garden approach to devices and software will lead us to a more controlled and less innovative world. In particular, they point to the app store and Apple’s zealous control over what apps consumers are allowed to purchase and run on their devices. Here’s the thing, though: Every Apple device comes with a web browser. A web browser is an escape hatch from Apple’s walled garden. And Apple has taken a backseat to no one in nurturing an open web. Consider this:

• Apple created and open-sourced Webkit, arguably the most modern and standards-compliant web rendering engine now available. It serves as the basis for the Safari and Google Chrome browsers on desktops and the iPhone, Android, WebOS, and Blackberry browsers on mobile devices. Why is that important? Because its strict adherence to HTML5 and related standards has allowed developers to make cross-platform applications (Like Google Docs and GMail) without worrying about proprietary extensions like those of Microsoft and Adobe. In fact, Webkit’s success is in large part responsible for Explorer’s decline and pressure on Microsoft to become more standards compliant.

• Apple’s war on Flash has often been portrayed as evidence of Apple’s domineering attitude, but in fact it can be seen as a victory for the open web. Flash, after all, is a closed proprietary technology. Apple’s refusal to include Flash in its mobile devices (and now Macs) not only makes for better devices since Flash is crashy, a CPU and battery hog, and a perennial security risk, but has also incentivized developers to move to HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript for their web applications. In fact, Adobe has been promoting tools that help convert their Flash applications to HTML5. Microsoft has similarly been backing away from its Flash competitor Silverlight in favor of open standards.

Will Apple ever see the open web as a threat to its walled garden? I’m not sure why they would. You’re still going to need a device to take advantage of web apps, and Apple is in the business of selling devices. What Apple does care about is making sure the web runs on open standards, so that they can’t be locked out and so that the web experience is no better on any other platform. If they can make sure that’s the case, then they can compete on another margin, namely what they’re good at: excellent devices and their vertical, integrated, curated software and media ecosystem.

Now, that strategy didn’t work for AOL. If you could get the web anywhere, why would you pay extra for curated Time-Warner content? I think there are differences. The web was an afterthought for AOL and it showed, and what AOL was offering for a premium was not very different from what was available for free on the web. But whether it works out for Apple or not, it’s closed business model is not only perfectly compatible with an open and “generative” web, but it’s in Apple’s interest to foster it and we’ve seen them do just that.