Internet Lockdown

While most of the fights around lock­ing down access to the inter­net has focused on whether telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion ven­dors will be giv­ing pref­er­en­tial treat­ment to cer­tain part­ners, a new threat has emerged far away from the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion industry.

As access to the Inter­net increas­ingly moves away from the PC and to mobile devices, it appears that the new model of inter­ac­tion with devices can now pro­vide mul­ti­ple points of lock­downs when it comes to the Internet.

Let me illustrate:

Access Lines

This is the area peo­ple have been most wor­ried about. In this sce­nario, cable or phone com­pa­nies can impose cer­tain lev­els of con­trol over what traf­fic is and isn’t allowed to access devices that are con­nected to those lines. For exam­ple, a cou­ple years ago, Com­cast dis­crim­i­nated against bitor­rent traf­fic with­out its users. The FCC later ruled such dis­crim­i­na­tion to be ille­gal.

The tele­com and cable indus­try usu­ally argue about the neces­sity of such dis­crim­i­na­tion as a mean of ensur­ing that all their users are being ser­viced prop­erly. Oppo­nents of such approaches, myself included, argue that the inter­net was cre­ated as an open medium and ought to be kept as such.

Device Lock­down

Tra­di­tion­ally, mobile devices have been largely locked down by the car­ri­ers, who con­trolled the expe­ri­ence from end to end, dic­tat­ing what could and couldn’t go on the phone and how it could be used. In the United States, the lock­down even goes as far as tying mobile phones to par­tic­u­lar net­works. It is cus­tom­ary for mobile devices to be locked to the mobile provider ser­vic­ing it (even in the case of GSM, the devices are locked to par­tic­u­lar carriers).

For a brief period, Apple seemed to wres­tle con­trol away from the oper­a­tors: with the intro­duc­tion of the iPhone, Apple cre­ated an oppor­tu­nity to wres­tle away con­trol of “the deck”, mean­ing the set of appli­ca­tions installed on a phone. With the suc­cess of its devices, the rest of the indus­try fol­lowed and it is now pretty com­mon­place for any mod­ern smart­phone ven­dor to have the oppor­tu­nity to let device users decide what soft­ware is installed on their phones.

At least, at first sight. The truth is that, while car­ri­ers have lost con­trol of the deck, the con­trol has not been given to the users. Users are given the impres­sion of con­trol as, it is true, they have the abil­ity to install more on their phones than at any other times. But the truth is that their choice is lim­ited at a dif­fer­ent gate­way point:

The Appli­ca­tion Store(s)

Appli­ca­tion stores are the newest point of con­trol for access to a lot of Inter­net func­tion­al­ity. In the case of Apple, that con­trol man­i­fests itself through the method the com­pany applies to decid­ing what is accept­able or not, when it comes to the app store. The rea­son I’ve been writ­ing a lot about Apple’s point of con­trol is that, if his­tory serves, what Apple does gen­er­ally has a wider impact as its com­peti­tors seem to fol­low what it does. As a thought leader, the com­pany thus has a dif­fer­ent level of respon­si­bil­ity to its indus­try (in a way, Apple is in a posi­tion not dis­sim­i­lar to Microsoft in the late 90s (with Win­dows), Google in the last decade (with its search engine), and prob­a­bly Face­book in the future (with its social graph)).

On one hand, appli­ca­tion store own­ers may argue that they are fil­ter­ing con­tent to ensure that their user com­mu­nity get the best expe­ri­ence pos­si­ble. The argu­ment may hold some water but, unfor­tu­nately, it is not dis­sim­i­lar from the idea cable and telco oper­a­tors pre­sented when they started to dis­crim­i­nate traf­fic on their net­works. On the other hand, com­pletely open stores more closely resem­ble the inter­net, a place where the cre­ation of indi­vid­u­als sits next to that of cor­po­ra­tions, and where some pages may offend while oth­ers enlighten.

What to do?

In such an envi­ron­ment, the fight to keep cen­sor­ship off the inter­net becomes more dif­fuse and more dif­fi­cult to manage.

If we are to build (and I still believe that we are in the early days of the inter­net) a new medium that remains as the most demo­c­ra­tic deliv­ery method for all of human’s expres­sion, we need to be fight back when any­one tries to lock the net down. Over a decade ago, the US Supreme Court ensured that the US gov­ern­ment could not cen­sor what is on the Inter­net: it is now OUR respon­si­bil­ity to ensure that other par­ties are not given that control.