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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."
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
The App Store is a store, not a bazaar. They approve/deny products just as any store would. You don't see people complaining that they can't just open up a booth to sell their own CDs in the local record store. I'm a supporter of net neutrality, but why does everything that uses the internet have to be neutral? I take net neutrality to mean everyone has equal access to the internet, not that developers can sell apps on the App Store without going through the current process of getting approved.
Software service providers have all the rights to lock down their applications and pre. My only beef is when they start pressuring ISPs to do the things at their end in order to save themselves time and effort.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
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.
Exactly, because you were required to buy an iphone/ipod touch. There wasn't a million other choices you could have picked. Nope, it's Apple or nothing.
AOL prodigy,compuserve, those are walled gardens. And they failed.
The app store is no different than barnes and noble online. You select items picked outby others and have them shipped.
You must learn to seperate the applications and services from thenetwork itself.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
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
Your analogy breaks down right there. When I moved from my Treo 600 to an iPhone, I didn't expect to be able to move my apps/games with me. Neither if I moved to a blackberry. Sure there will be some great devs who do cross-platform stuff (PopCap: Bookworm), but that's because they take the time and effort to write it in different platforms
The iPhone is NOT a car. You can't die by using a phone, and the phone industry is not nearly as regulated as the auto industry.
In short, I have NO expectation that I should be able to move my apps from one platform to another, willy-nilly. Maybe if everything was copyleft'd and we were all using ports-capable OS's, sure. But I have no expectation of that any time soon.
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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.
I wish more people would choose to not buy those things.
Precisely. You don't like the lockdown and you wish people chose not to buy it. That's your right.
But.. people DO choose to buy these things, knowing that Apple can be real assholes about controlling what you've bought from them. Not only do they choose them, they get in long lines and pay outrageous amounts of money for it.
But, in the end, they are choosing. Which means there's a free market out there - you can buy an Android, or a Blackberry, or a -- god, there are hundreds of smartphones out there, just pick one.
And most of the other vendors are pretty good about apps. Blackberry has their own (thinly-veiled clone of the Apple) app store, but I can also install software directly from the authors and/or download it and install it from my desktop. I'm not tied to it. And I have yet to download anything on my Blackberry that AT&T has told me I cannot use.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I find the car analogy disingenuous at best.
If I buy a Ford, I can't start throwing SAAB suspension parts and Volkswagon exchaust with a Honda engine in it. Doesn't work like that.
You chose to buy the product, and thus you chose to limit yourself to a particular mechanic. You locked yourself in, not Apple. And as long as Apple isn't telling ISPs to stop users from connecting to the Zune store, or eMusic, or Napster, or any other download service.
As far as apps? Tell me I can put T-Mobile software onto a Verizon phone. iPhone is no different than any other provider who sells apps for their devices. They've just done it better than, say, Motorola.
(posted in the wrong nesting, initially)
Wrong, the App Store is like a big box mall with a giant Wal-Mart and name-brand stores, surrounded by teeny mom-and-pop shops. Sure, everyone can buy at the mom-and-pop shop if they like, but is it really Wal-Mart's fault (or the mall's owners) that people like to shop at Wal-Mart or, say, Abercrombie & Fitch?
Moreover, should Abercrombie & Fitch be forced to sell, say, clown shoes just because some clowns can't find a suitable novelty shoe store in the mall and are too lazy or incompetent to look for one elsewhere?
The point is that nobody is forced to use an iPhone--it is far from the only alternative that is out there. So, some people like it enough to purchase and use it, but wish the vendor operated in a different way? Easy, complain to them with your dollars.
What that's? Nobody in the real world (i.e. outside the tech circles) cares enough to complain and just keeps on using the devices? Well, boo-hoo.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
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.
--
make install -not war
Apple has contracts with ATT and the fellow app makers.
What gives Apple the right to enter into contracts which restrict my behavior? And whatever it is, do we really have to live in a society that tolerates that?
If you bought an iPhone, you did.
The concern with respect to Net Neutrality is that you can't just go use a different Internet. If all of the major backbone providers collude to set pricing for access to their market of users then the consumer has no recourse as building a new backbone is insanely expensive, and arguably couldn't be done again from scratch without the backing of a major government.
On the other hand, you can go buy an Android phone any time you want.
You can choose the restrictive provider or the permissive one. If you choose the restrictive provider and then complain about their being restrictive, then you're either not paying attention or just looking for an argument (that's down the hall on the right).
There's this magical thing called "Java". Perhaps you've heard of it?
Haven't we been through this before? Nobody has taken the cross platform capabilities of Java seriously since "All Your Base" jokes went out of style.
Not a typewriter
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.
Get a life, not a lifestyle. - Hikem Bey
Haven't we been through this before? Nobody has taken the cross platform capabilities of Java seriously since "All Your Base" jokes went out of style.
What you say?!?
Oh, sorry. :/
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