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Towards a Permission-Based Web
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."
We on slashdot are pretty much the only ones who care about net neutrality. My dad(*) doesn't have a clue why it's important.
The App Store is the most flagrant example of non-neutral app built on top of the Internet. But if you were to push the argument further, I have restrictions on how many pictures I can upload on Flickr. Is that neutral?
(*) I'm using my dad as a stereotype instead of my mother because I recently learned that using mothers as examples of clueless users is sexist. So I'm applying some affirmative action
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help build the web community where fans get involved with the bands they love
My gmail account isn't really portable. Sure, I can back it up, but the email is really the least of it. If google decided to lock me out of it tomorrow, I'd be fubared.
Websites provided specialized services is nothing new. The app store isn't a new concept, consoles had it longer.
Is the AppStore a neutral network? Should it be?
No, and no.
It's perfectly fine for the Internet to have walled-off sections like this, provided you can opt to go somewhere else if you want. If you don't like the way Apple's App Store has been going (and I don't much like it myself), don't buy an iPhone. There are alternatives both existing now and coming down the pipe soon.
The problem comes with ISPs want to create their own walled-off sections that their customers can't get out of. Since ISPs are often regional monopolies or duopolies, they have too much power to dictate terms to their users, which is why Net Neutrality activists focus on them.
Not a typewriter
This sounds a bit to me like the people who argue that if Marijuana were legalized and taxed, everyone would just grow their own and not have to pay taxes on it. In both cases, the effort is often too time consuming and difficult for the average person.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Agreed. His juxtaposition of the mobile and desktop perspectives of net neutrality makes no pragmatic sense. We can still slap anything we want on our desktops and surf anywhere with relatively minimal (if any) meddling from our ISPs.
As a final WTF, he shamelessly shouts out to Android and open source as the answer to society's ills. Guess what people? The average user can't do shit with their phones, Android or otherwise, as long as the telco's are in charge of what goes on them!
Saying that Android is free is like telling people that a chained servant is free*
. *free in his mind, that is.
This is the second time this week I've heard someone who's theoretically part of the tech media discuss "network neutrality" in a way that demonstrates they have no idea what the concept actually means. Earlier this week I was listening to a guy say he was against network neutrality because people who use a higher amount of bandwidth should have to pay more for their internet access than people like him who require less bandwidth.
What's going on here? Why are these people being given any recognition at all? This is Slashdot, ostensibly "News for Nerds" - shouldn't some modicum of filtering be happening? And no, I am not new here...
#DeleteChrome
*You* have restrictions on how many pictures *you* can upload on Flickr. *I* dont, because I pay for the service.
Well, I was so foolish to RTFA and I am kinda infuriated now. The article tries to make a valid point about the importance of net neutrality and open source, but in my opinion fails horribly to do so because it mixes it up in a hodgepodge of buzzwords and misunderstood and wrongy applied concepts.
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.
The reality is, we are free to chose with our Dollars which phone we want to buy. Nobody had a gun to my head when i signed a contract on my iPhone.
The reality of it is if i want an open platform, I'll go buy a open phone. At some point developer mindshare might shift towards the Android App Store, but there is no force at work with the app store other than free market control. As it makes financial sense for apple to open up their 'walled garden', they will do so. Until then to legislate what they can or can't sell, or how to control the nature of the content they accept or reject seems like a slippery slope, arguably just as evil as something as broad as the DMCA.
An infringement on a corporations freedom to operate their business is going to be an infringement on my personal freedoms.
We have anti-competitive laws, anti-price fixing laws, all sorts of regulations to promote fair competition and I don't see how this is even an issue.
Google knows that they can't play in Apples sandbox fairly, so what did they do? They are doing exactly what they should be doing and creating a competitive sandbox. They are going to leverage all their corporate offerings to entice the user to play in their sandbox instead. If you think that Google is creating the Android phone to be an open platform to liberate the people from a closed platform like iPhones and the sort, think again. There is a calculation that the mindshare of having people on android will yield more add revenue, and possibly corporate services (hosted apps, etc) than not.
If Android didn't mean $$ for Google, it would be canned faster than a middle-management position at Sun.
The fact that google has an incredible cloud-stack to put behind the Android phones and make it stupid-simple to make it all work together should make Apple VERY VERY nervous.
I expect to see some serious cloud offerings from apple in the near future to counter this juggernaut google, who has the iPhone square in their cross-hairs.
The stakes are -huge- for smart phone market share. Google understands that this is the next stage of their growth to maintain global search and adword marketshare they currently enjoy.
The king is dead, long live the king. Competition.
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.
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make install -not war
Net neutrality matters most at the basic transport level.
Because then, if I want to choose Apple's protective
yet limited "walled garden of eden" I can, or I can
choose the wild west, as long as I brought my six gun
and know how to make my own campfire from belly button
lint and a couple of stones.
I think it is good to have both levels of choice and freedom.
I personally give up freedom for the iPhone's superior
usability and app quality control (less cruft to sort through.)
I may find a fart app, but it will be an easy to use fart app.
On cellphones, speed of understanding of and operation of
the app is paramount. I'm happy so far with Apple's design
guidelines, and mostly, with their editorial choices. I have
the freedom to move on if I don't like it.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Apple goal of late (at least since Steve Jobs return) is to return to the glory days of IBM and DEC. During the 60 & 70's IBM, DEC and almost all computer makers owned and controlled everything about their product lines. They build and serviced all the hardware and wrote almost all of the software. If you were a ISV or 3rd party you need to go through them/work by their rules to get access to their customers.
Apple is doing the same thing. They want complete control over their customer base. Want to sell an Apple customer software or accessories? You need to sell it through the App Store or include an Apple provided chip in your accessory, and they decide who sells through the App Store and who can make accessories. My only surprise is why they haven't started to lock down their computers and Mac OS.
So to be clear. If you own an Apple product you are an Apple customer first and foremost. And Apple decides who can sell software and hardware to you.
As always their are exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions.
Anyways, with tools like tcp->dns relays, and tools like me walking around, I wonder how long this dirty little secret will work out.
They'll change the DNS server for unauthed computers to only serve the billing page and redirect all A queries to a single IP. You could probably write that app in a few hours.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"