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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."
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.
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
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
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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