SCN: Flexibility vs control

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes

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by Jonathan L. Zittrain, assistant professor at Harvard Law School 
and director of its Berkman Center for Internet & Society

(NY Times)---Last month the top executives of two of the most 
powerful media companies in the world traveled to Washington to 
testify before Congress about the most dangerous threat they face: 
the American consumer. 

Of course, they didn't quite phrase it that way. 

Michael Eisner, chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, 
complained that the technology industry made it too easy for 
"people wanting to get anything for free on their television or 
computer or hand-held device." 

Peter Chernin, president of the News Corporation, worried that the 
Internet's "ability to empower the general public" would lead to the 
online theft of some of the contents of media companies' digital 
treasuries.  

Both men want the next generation of personal computers to be 
unable to deliver unauthorized movies, music and other content, 
and they asked that Congress stand ready to intervene if industry 
failed to deliver the necessary technology to safeguard its 
products. 

A lone executive, from Intel, objected. The market, he said, not 
Congress, should dictate how technology works.  

The debate on Capitol Hill between content providers like Disney 
and those who make the products to deliver that content, like Intel, 
was really a proxy for a much larger debate: What do we want our 
technology to do? How do we want it to work? And do we have 
any say in the matter?  

For most forms of current technology, these questions have long 
been settled. No executives are worried about illegal uses of 
televisions or coffee makers, for instance, and no consumers need 
to worry that these appliances will crash or become infected with 
viruses - and we would never accept it if they did. Our TV's and 
VCR's don't take ill when we watch infected programs, and our 
refrigerators never require rebooting.  

Yet we have come to tolerate such problems from our personal 
computers. The PC's fundamental and unique unreliability flows 
from its construction as a so-called flexible platform - a mere 
staging area for many kinds of software. The point (and bane) of a 
PC is, essentially, to run whatever software it encounters.  

There are plenty of reliable computers: the controls of the modern 
Airbus 340 are fully given over to a computer, and video-game 
consoles consistently work as advertised, as do Aegis missile 
cruisers, cellular telephones and digital watches. All contain 
transistors. Can technologists figure out how to replicate the 
reliability of airplanes, telephones, watches and televisions in 
future versions of Windows and Linux, so that a mischievous 12-
year-old half a world away can't erase a thousand far-flung hard 
drives?  

Absolutely. In January Bill Gates sent a memo to all Microsoft 
employees declaring a new, overarching, even revolutionary 
mandate: Software must be reliable and "trustworthy." This new 
focus is both welcome and worrisome, because the very steps 
needed to secure our computers and networks can be the steps 
that will deaden them to continued innovation and creative uses - 
while opening them to more intrusive monitoring by mainstream 
technology manufacturers and content providers.  

Mr. Gates and the co-captains of his industry are producing 
blueprints for so-called "trusted" PC's. They will employ digital 
gatekeepers that act like the bouncers outside a nightclub, 
ensuring that only software that looks or behaves a certain way is 
allowed in. The result will be more reliable computing - and more 
control over the machine by the manufacturer or operating system 
maker, which essentially gives the bouncer her guest list.  

And as soon as there are limits on the software a PC can run, 
there will be limits on what PC users can do. That's exactly what 
executives like Mr. Eisner and Mr. Chernin want. They'd like 
software and hardware companies to build PC's to allow a 
publisher an exquisite level of control over a book or a song or a 
movie in the hands of a consumer. Trusted PC users might spend 
$1.95 for a single viewing of the latest Disney animated feature, or 
they might pay a similar amount for three listens of U2's most 
recent single. Security, stability, reliability - and control.  

Users may buy a trusted PC even if it won't show a digital video 
lent by a friend, because it will act less like a temperamental 
computer and more like a crash-free super-VCR - like the just-
released Microsoft X-box. But in the process of "improving" our 
PC's, the manufacturers and their partners will be able to 
determine what software will and won't be allowed to run, what we 
can and can't do with the information to which we're exposed, and 
what data about our online activities will be collected and sent to 
the manufacturer or content provider to assist in future marketing.  

Apart from manufacturers' desire not to define the uses of a PC too 
narrowly, the public interest in flexible computer platforms and 
open data exchange remains almost entirely absent from this 
debate. Disney and its cohort are free to view PC's as delivery 
systems for Mickey Mouse and friends - and to make their content 
available through broadband. But it's an entirely different matter to 
re-engineer the PC so it becomes simply another appliance.  

The PC platform and the Internet to which it connects is the engine 
of the information revolution - as important to our economy and 
culture as all the movies in Hollywood. A shift from open platforms 
to closed appliances may be inevitable, as our consumerist desire 
for trustworthy PC's dovetails with information providers' obsession 
with control. 

But we should beware the haste with which some would sacrifice 
flexibility for control. If we can't at least temper this taming of the 
chaotic PC, the victims will be competition, innovation and 
consumer freedom.  


Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company





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