[Infowarrior] - Zittrain: A fight over freedom at Apple’s core

Fri Feb 5 16:36:38 UTC 2010

A fight over freedom at Apple’s core
By Jonathan Zittrain

Published: February 3 2010 20:40 | Last updated: February 3 2010 20:40

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/fcabc720-10fb-11df-9a9e-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1

In 1977, a 21-year-old Steve Jobs unveiled something the world had  
never seen before: a ready-to-program personal computer. After  
powering the machine up, proud Apple II owners were confronted with a  
cryptic blinking cursor, awaiting instructions.

The Apple II was a clean slate, a device built – boldly – with no  
specific tasks in mind. Yet, despite the cursor, you did not have to  
know how to write programs. Instead, with a few keystrokes you could  
run software acquired from anyone, anywhere. The Apple II was  
generative. After the launch, Apple had no clue what would happen  
next, which meant that what happened was not limited by Mr Jobs’  
hunches. Within two years, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston had released  
VisiCalc, the first digital spreadsheet, which ran on the Apple II.  
Suddenly businesses around the world craved machines previously  
marketed only to hobbyists. Apple IIs flew off the shelves. The  
company had to conduct research to figure out why.

Thirty years later Apple gave us the iPhone. It was easy to use,  
elegant and cool – and had lots of applications right out of the box.  
But the company quietly dropped a fundamental feature, one signalled  
by the dropping of “Computer” from Apple Computer’s name: the iPhone  
could not be programmed by outsiders. “We define everything that is on  
the phone,” said Mr Jobs. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC.  
The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and  
then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work any more.”

The openness on which Apple had built its original empire had been  
completely reversed – but the spirit was still there among users.  
Hackers vied to “jailbreak” the iPhone, running new apps on it despite  
Apple’s desire to keep it closed. Apple threatened to disable any  
phone that had been jailbroken, but then appeared to relent: a year  
after the iPhone’s introduction, it launched the App Store. Now  
outsiders could write software for the iPhone, setting the stage for a  
new round of revolutionary VisiCalcs – not to mention tens of  
thousands of simple apps such as iPhone Harmonica or the short-lived I  
Am Rich, which for $999.99 displayed a picture of a gem, just to show  
that the iPhone owner could afford the software.

But the App Store has a catch: app developers and their software must  
be approved by Apple. If Apple does not like the app, for any reason,  
it is gone. I Am Rich was axed from the Store after it was ridiculed  
in the press. Another app, Freedom Time, never made it in. It counted  
down the days to the end of George W. Bush’s US presidency, and that  
was deemed too politically sensitive. An e-mail reader was denied  
because it competed with Apple’s own Mail app. Imagine if Microsoft’s  
Bill Gates had decreed that no other word processor but Word would be  
allowed to run on the Windows operating system. Microsoft lost a  
decade-long competition lawsuit for far less proprietary behaviour.

Despite outsiders being invited to write software, the iPhone thus  
remains tightly tethered to its vendor – the way that the Kindle is  
controlled by Amazon. George Orwell’s 1984 was retroactively zapped  
from Kindles around the world after Amazon grew concerned that it had  
sold the book without permission.

To be sure, many rejected apps will not be missed. (Only eight  
spendthrifts bought I Am Rich before it disappeared.) And users can be  
protected from harmful software from suspect sources. But consider:  
the world wide web started as, and remains, an app. Its first versions  
were written by Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist who was  
unaffiliated with any software or hardware vendor. How worthy of  
approval would Wikipedia have seemed when it boasted only seven  
articles – dubiously hoping that the public would magically provide  
the rest? How threatened might today’s content publishers feel by peer- 
to-peer apps that let iPhone users trade data from one phone to  
another? We know the answer to that: enough that they have persuaded  
Apple to exclude all such apps from the App Store.

It is tempting to think that a little outside software is better than  
none. But what is fine for a single device may be bad for the  
ecosystem. The iPhone’s hybrid model of centrally controlled outside  
software is already moving beyond the smart phone. This is the  
significance of the iPad. It could have been built either like a small  
Apple Macintosh – open to any outside software – or as a big iPhone,  
controlled by Apple. Apple went with the latter. Attach a keyboard to  
it and it could replace a PC entirely – boasting plenty of new apps,  
but only as Apple deems them worthy.

If Apple is the gatekeeper to a device’s uses, the governments of the  
world need knock on the door of only one office in Cupertino,  
California – Apple’s headquarters – to demand changes to code or  
content . Users no longer own or control the apps they run – they  
merely rent them minute by minute.

Hope lies in more balanced combinations of open and closed systems,  
such as that embodied by the traditional Apple Mac – or phones based  
on the Android operating system from the Open Handset Alliance, a  
consortium of hardware, software and telecoms companies. Android  
Market is the approved counterpart to Apple’s App Store but, in this  
case, users are also free to go off-roading, installing any code they  
like. Android is a canary in the digital coal mine: will its more open  
model survive should people load suspect apps and find they cannot  
make calls any more?

Mr Jobs ushered in the personal computer era and now he is trying to  
usher it out. We should focus on preserving our freedoms, even as the  
devices we acquire become more attractive and easier to use.

The writer is professor of law at Harvard Law School and a founder of  
its Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He is author of The Future  
of the Internet – and How to Stop It