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There was some excellent work by Dr. Aleks Krotoski in Sunday night’s BBC documentary Virtual Revolution, especially the interview with Tim Berners-Lee where he reiterated the importance of freedom of information, and freedom of access. Aleks made the point that the federated structure of the internet resists authority. This documentary went out at prime time and did a fantastic job or explaining the absolutely world-changing importance of the web, without patronizing or over-simplifying the issue. Watching it, even after having worked on the web for the last 13 years, almost brought a tear to my eye. They really should do something very, very special with Tim Berners-Lee. Maybe put him on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square?

Also, there was yet another polished product launch by Apple this week with the announcement of the iPad.

These two events caused me to think back to a 2008 talk by Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Harvard, to employees of The Guardian, as part of their Future of Journalism series. His talk was based on his book, the then about to be published The Future Of The Internet, And How To Stop It.

He talked at length about how we are in danger of adopting a top-down, tightly controlled model for the web, run overwhelmingly in the interests of large corporations; technology’s inexorable move towards locked-down digital units and tethered appliances; and ‘walled garden’ internet access. The beauty of the iPhone, when it launched, was that for what seemed like the first time we had a real web browser on a real mobile device which freed us from the tyranny of telco executives who wanted to control what we used our high-priced WAP data access plans to look at. We could go anywhere we wanted. It felt truly free. Now it seems, as Dr. Aleks pointed out with a useful proportional representation model of the web, we are increasingly moving to a future Zittrain warns about, one with a narrow marketplace controlled by a handful of powerful providers, where we go to iTunes for our music, Amazon, or perhaps iTunes, for our books, to eBay to sell our old stuff and to Wikipedia, run by a sinister cabal of administrators headed by the despotic Jimmy Wales, for our raw factual information. We can’t even view Flash content on an iPhone or Blu-Ray on a Mac due to Apple’s strict control over what can and can’t be installed on these systems. Whether it’s political or, as Steve Jobs supposedly says, because Flash is so buggy, I’m sure we’ll find out when the dust has settled. For now it appears to be a mobile device manufacturer — with something approaching a monopoly — trying to throw their weight around. The documentary raised some fascinating points about power structures on the web, and it certainly seems that we are only really beginning to understand how any of this will work.

Zittrain, in his book (which is itself licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License) ,says,

“A shift to tethered appliances and locked-down PCs will have a ripple effect on long-standing cyberlaw problems, many of which are tugs-of-war between individuals with a real or perceived injury from online activity and those who wish to operate as freely as possible in cyberspace. The capacity for the types of disruptive innovation discussed in the previous chapter will not be the only casualty. A shift to tethered appliances also entails a sea change in the regulability of the Internet. With tethered appliances, the dangers of excess come not from rogue third-party code, but from the much more predictable interventions by regulators into the devices themselves, and in turn into the ways that people can use the appliances.”

The iPad is certainly a continuation on the theme that was started with the iPod – access to app installation is through the App Store only. Jailbreaking your iPhone is possible but verboten. People are already complaining — it doesn’t multitask! there’s no camera! For all that technology has advanced our personal feeling of freedom us, we feel simultaneously liberated and emasculated as a result. I read another quote by someone but I’ve misplaced the link, who said,

“…in the “applianced” world we are threatened by monopolists and potential dictators,”

for whom we could easily substitute Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and Mr Steve Jobs.

Recently, Mark Pilgim, a writer an developer advocate at Google, published a blogpost commiserating the demise of the tinkerer; that breed of person who found out how a computer works by poking around the innards of its operating system, or its hardware. Activity seen very rarely these days. Because now, of course, such activity will at the very least get your warranty voided, and at worst get you arrested.

Pilgrim continues this theme in an interview at a great new (to me) blog, The Setup, which asks techies and nerds of all descriptions to describe the technology they use to get the job done. In describing how he wants to still be using his current desktop computer in 20 years, he says

“Commercial vendors have a vested interest in upgrading you to the latest and greatest; supporting the old stuff is unglamorous and expensive. Commercial open source vendors aren’t really much better than commercial proprietary vendors in this regard, but community-led Linux distributions can afford to have different priorities.”

So, does the black box of user-friendliness and usability necessitate a top down, authoritarian attitude to technology, or can the interests of individuals and the market not happily co-exist? There’s certainly an argument for the former when you look at some of the abysmal user experiences offered by open-source software that’s available — Ubuntu; the GIMP. With their vast number of contributors you would expect quality and consistency to improve. But perhaps in the vastly ambiguous area of usability and design a greater number of contributing authors dilutes the quality of a product or an experience. Maybe a lone, dictatorial voice is the only answer here, as in the case of Apple’s justly famous and evangelised user interface. But at what cost comes the power to control every user’s experience, even against their will?

LATE UPDATE: Two other quotes that caught my eye. As an interesting counterpoint, Dion Almaer, erstwhile Mozilla developer and now Developer Advocate at Palm, mulls over profits-based corporations versus goal-based organisations, and passes over the hyperbole about Flash’s rumoured death to express thanks that the Open Web (i.e. the web)

“…is amazing in that there is NO SINGLE VENDOR. If we are able to keep a decent balance between browsers (and thus the platform as we know it) then we have a balance of powers. Sure, in some ways you can’t move as fast as a dictatorship, but there is a reason we don’t want dictatorships in our government (even if the trains run on time!)”

And a former colleague of mine, Daniel Vydra, makes the succinct point,

“Commenters [on this Guardian article] need to decide if apple is a restrictive dangerous monopoly, or a 5% market share joke. They can’t be both.”