Nate Anderson’s interview with Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It is a fascinating examination of the conflict between closed devices and sites, and open ones, and is filled with hidden gems:
Facebook platform, Google apps, Google Gears, iPhone apps—this shows that manufacturers see the value of having the nerds coding stuff. They see the value to them, they probably see the value to society. But they now have the ability to put a huge asterisk next to it, and I don’t think anybody has yet really thought through what that asterisk could mean, especially when you see regulators waking up to the fact that they get to regulate through the asterisk.
Zittrain’s main point, in the interview and I’m assuming in the book as well, is that devices which allow for unrestricted development spur innovation and ones which don’t, even if the restriction is minimal, are dangerous. And he’s not just talking iPhones here. He’s pointing his finger at any service with centralized means of control. That includes things as simple as your cell phone, and as relatively complex as your bittorrent tracker running on an Amazon EC2 instance.
He’s careful not to impugn closed services - they obviously offer certain benefits in terms of simplicity and security - but he does seem overly worried that the time will come when it’s impossible to create dangerous ideas. Think Napster, not napalm.
As far as sounding a warning bell, OK, he has a solid point. The best advances we’ve seen have come from the margins, are often dangerous to entrenched businesses, and frequently misunderstood by our legal system. As he says:
The Scrabulous people might be hard for Hasbro to reach, but Hasbro can go to Facebook and say, “Shut it down.”
But it seems to me that the richness of the marketplace right now isn’t going away. There is, and will most likely remain, a strong enough demand for untethered platforms that there will always be an alternative. Apple can stop an idea on the iPhone, but they can’t do much about OpenMoko (should it ever actually be released). Facebook has control now, but we’re already seeing a push towards OpenSocial.
This is a cyclical thing. Every few years someone creates a new closed platform that’s attractive enough to garner geek love. And a few years later, they overplay their hand and the geeks go marching elsewhere. Even the worst of our closed platforms, the telephone system, wasn’t closed enough that the internet couldn’t be built on top of it.