Towards a Permission-Based Web 230
On his blog over at RedMonk, analyst James Governor looks at the walled garden we seem to be moving into, and possible cracks in the wall. "As we rush to purchase Apple products and services on Cupertino’s monochrome treadmill of shiny shiny, I can’t help thinking the open web community is losing something vital — a commitment to net neutrality and platform openness. If a single company can decide what plays on the network and what does not, in arbitrary fashion, how can that be net neutrality? ... Is the AppStore a neutral network? Should it be? Is Comcast, the company net neutrality proponents love to hate, really the only company we should be wary of? Pipe level neutrality is surely only one layer of a stack. The wider market always chooses proprietary wrappers — every technology wave is co-opted by a master packager. Success in the IT industry has always been about packaging — doing the best job of packaging technologies as they emerge. Twas ever thus." Governor ends his essay with an optimistic look at Android, which he says "potentially fragments The Permission Based Web, and associated data ownership-based business models."
Re:we care (Score:1, Informative)
Re:we care (Score:5, Informative)
While it is true Apple should be able to choose what to sell and what not to sell on their own store..
The actual complaint with the iTunes store is that Apple tries to prevent you from shopping at any other store to get software for the hardware you own (iPod touch/iPhone specific there really)
That is the neutrality issue in that specific case.
The music side of the store is fine. You can get MP3s anywhere. You can put your MP3s from anywhere on your Apple devices, No issue.
Without jailbreaking (Something Apple hasn't stated is OK to do, and has at least implied it is NOT OK to do) you can't load software of your choosing on your own hardware, only software Apple deems worthy to sell on their store.
That is the issue.
NO YOU (Score:2, Informative)
*You* have restrictions on how many pictures *you* can upload on Flickr. *I* dont, because I pay for the service.
Wrong assumption (Score:4, Informative)
I cannot even start to describe what I feel is wrong with this article, but the last paragraph contains two especially big stinkers:
-First, the ill-fated assumption that the performance and the responsiveness of the iPhone is just an "implementation detail" and that Android phones would have an advantage because they have better specs. As if there never have been cases in IT history where the competitors with the better specs lost out (*cough* iPod killers *cough* Console wars *cough*)
-And even more wrong the assumption that just because Android is an open-source implementation, the web itself would become more open. WTF? Why should it make a difference whether the platform with which I access the web is open, when the web application itself isnt (regardless of the fact that both Android and the iPhone use the same browser engine)? And why should for example Amazon (which is named in the article) be more inclined to open up its data when we use an Android device opposed to an iPhone?
I know that the argument that he tries to make is that openness is very important and that we should strive to not get proprietary insulas in the web as we had in traditional applications. But I think that openness he strives for is not necessarily tied to open source and net neutrality, you need better data portability and better access to the data stored inside those web entities, which is a whole different can of worms right there.
So the big mistake of this article is not promoting open source and net neutrality, which are important. The big mistake is assuming those two will be sufficient in achieving the kind of openness that he wants. They wont, but he fails to see that.
Lock-In, Not the Network (Score:5, Informative)
The App Store is not a network, except for the intranet at Apple that it runs on. Intranets are not subject to network neutrality, and the App Store's is totally irrelevant to this. Neither is AT&T's network required to be neutral for traffic that is totally confined to it.
The public Internet, like any "common carrier" network (whether data, or TV, or railroads as originally legislated), must be neutral to prevent unfair competition.
The App Store is fundamentally faulty because iPhones are locked into it. That is also true of all US phones locked into their wireless carrier's network, but that problem in common is the lock-in, not "Network Neutrality".
The App Store faces competition from Android primarily because the Android doesn't lock in to a single, vendor controlled app store. Google's work in recent years to break the phone/network lockin also indicates Android phones will probably get out of that bundling, too, well before iPhones do. The App Store's "vertical monopoly" should be broken by competition, from Android and others.
Indeed, Mac desktop software used to be locked in by Apple, too. Every app needed a 32 bit code ("Creator" code) controlled by Apple to identify it to the desktop, associate it with files, etc, or the app wouldn't work under the OS. Apple required every app to be submitted for registration before releasing the code. Apple was known to block some apps from reaching desktops by withholding the code, for reasons at the sole discretion of Apple. After a while, that ended, because the load of evaluating all the apps was too heavy for Apple to keep paying for, because enough people complained, and because the constrained app market looked worse than the totally unrestrained availability of every kind of app under Windows.
The sooner the iPhone and app store go that way, especially to compete with Google's Android Market, the better. But abusing the definition of "network" to get there, which will dilute efforts to get actual public networks to be properly neutral to content and endpoints (already with the cards stacked against it), will be only counterproductive.
Re:we care (Score:4, Informative)
Net Neutrality and Vendor Lock-In are not the same thing.
Net Neutrality is talking about access and QoS of Internet Traffic. Vendor lock-in is a stupid practice that has been going on for ages because people don't learn from the past.