Archive for December, 2010

Net Neutrality

Posted in tech on December 22, 2010 by themaroon

The FCC passed it’s long-awaited Net Neutrality rules (promise by President Obama during his campaigning) and reaction has been mixed. Mostly they’ve been negative, but they’ve been negative in opposite directions, with the rabidly pro Net Neutrality advocates slamming it for being not tough enough, and the people on the opposite side saying it’s going to run ISPs out of business.

The complaint of the EFF-types is largely that wireless broadband carriers are exempt from the Unreasonable Discrimination clause, which states that:

A person engaged in the provision of fixed broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not unreasonably discriminate in transmitting lawful network traffic over a consumer’s broadband Internet access service. Reasonable network management shall not constitute unreasonable discrimination.

What this means is that Comcast cannot charge you for watching Netflix streaming, even though it competes with their Hulu service, or accept payments from Yahoo to make Google searches really slow. Wireless carriers, however, can do this if they choose.

I’m quite alright with this. The government has long regulated natural monopolies, and it’s a system that, while not perfect, works pretty well. Wired broadband is functionally a natural monopoly, or perhaps more accurately a natural duopoly since both telephone and cable lines have been repurposed to provide broadband data.

Wireless broadband, like wireless phone service, is far from a natural monopoly. There are four major carriers in the U.S., and scores of regionals and MVNOs, all competing on margins. There are also data only wireless services like Clearwire and Aircell and a few satellite providers. Prices have been steadily decreasing (though services have increased). I now pay less for boundless minutes, unlimited text and 4g data than I paid for far fewer minutes, pre-3g data, and 100 SMSes a month a few years back on the same carrier. I used to suffer from overage fees regularly, now with the free mobile to mobile, earlier nights and weekends, and unlimited SMSing I don’t even come within 500 minutes of my cap.

Wireless broadband doesn’t need to be regulated because the market will take care of it. As long as the government doesn’t allow any further M&A in the space, which I don’t think they will, we can let the free market act. If Verizon starts slowing down Google searches, I’ll switch to Sprint, who I’m fairly certain never will. The first rule of the FCC’s regulation, transparency, does not exempt wireless carriers from being forced to disclose this sort of behavior and that’s enough.

What I think we’ll see, instead, is usage caps. The networks are strained not by average people, but by those (unfortunately myself included) who use the internet as a replacement for everything. Those of us who get our TV shows and movies streamed from Netflix or downloaded via BitTorrent, purchase (or obtain by other means) our music online, etc. are going to have to pay extra for the privilege. But thanks to the Net Neutrality regulations we won’t have a situation in which ISPs exert undue influence on whether you shop at Amazon or Buy.com, or search via Google or Yahoo.

Supporting Multiple Types of DRM Is Not The Same As Being Open.

Posted in Illiterature on December 7, 2010 by themaroon

Google launched their eBook store yesterday. As a die-hard Kindle fan and avid read I’m quite disappointed. As an author I’m excited. It’s as if I have split personalities fighting over the last drumstick at Thanksgiving, and either way I both win and lose.

The promise behind Google Books, it was rumored, was that you could read the books everywhere.  As Google themselves said “We designed Google eBooks to be open.” Unfortunately what that means is they’ll run on any device that plays nicely with their DRM. Supporting many forms of DRM on many locked-down devices is not the same as being open.

In fact, I can’t tell what’s “open” about it at all. In my browser I can’t seem to select text or right click, so I can’t copy and paste the book. (I haven’t had time yet to open up Firebug and figure out what’s going on, it might just be something simple.) I don’t see any way to get a DRM-free document that I could convert to run on my Kindle.

I’m sure the closed nature of the system is not Google’s choice, that’s probably demanded by the publishers. But as Judge Judy would say, Google is peeing on our legs and telling us it’s raining. I know open when I see it, and Google Books is not open.

I can see why publishers wouldn’t allow a truly open book store. Scott Adams says that in the near future there will be no such thing as a professional writer, which would mean that there would be no such thing as a professional publisher either. Publishers aren’t stupid, they want to remain in business. There’s a lot of money in remaining in business.

And to be honest, I think they’ve got a real shot of pulling it off. The reason DRM can’t work in music is that record companies still sell the same exact songs on CD. It only takes one unlocked copy of the file to propagate, and then all people who want to download the music illegally for free can do so. Books, by contrast, are  usually not sold in any DRM-free digital format, and book scanners are out of reach for most people. As long as publishers can maintain the upper hand in the cat and mouse game of DRM vs .circumvention they can avoid the fate of the music industry.

Right now I can trivially find any song or disc you can find on iTunes, plus many more, in seconds. I have yet to have the experience of searching for some music I know to exist and not finding it. I can find a decent number of books too, but far from all of them. And a lot of the ones I can find are in a PDF format without text reflow, meaning converting them requires using OCR which is ugly.

So perhaps it’s my own wishful thinking, as a past and potential future author, but I think DRM is here to stay in books. And I think Google’s new product is evidence of that.

App Stores Are Here To Stay

Posted in Mobile on December 1, 2010 by themaroon

Fred Wilson wrote, a few days back:

I saw two HTML5 apps yesterday. One running in my Android browser. The other running in the iPad browser. They looked and worked exactly like their mobile app counterparts. It was a mind opening moment.

…

I’ve always disliked the idea that we have to download apps on our phones when the apps we use on the web are loaded in the browser on demand. But I’ve accepted the mobile app paradigm as something we will be living with for the next five years.

I’m not sure it’s five years anymore.

As an app developer I hope he is correct but I think he’s perhaps misunderstanding why native apps are so appealing. As far as I see it native applications have three primary benefits: technology, distribution, and monetization.

As far as technology goes, Fred may be right. The number of things you can do in HTML5 will continue to increase. HTML5’s geolocation functionality (already supported on many devices) takes care of one of the big ones.

Unfortunately the one thing you can’t make in HTML5 right now are rich games, which is exactly what people are using. You can make pong, but you can’t make Angry Birds. If and when WebGL is ready for prime time the number of apps you’ll actually need to make native will decrease significantly. I’m always hesitant to put a timeline on standards being finalized and adopted (remember the 802.11n debacle) but 5 years might be realistic for usable WebGL on most major smart phones. I wouldn’t bet on much sooner though, and as long as games are driving what people use the platforms for, which you can always safely bet on, native apps aren’t going to disappear.

However I’m far less hopeful that the other two advantages will disappear in five years. Right now Apple has a huge lead as far as monetization goes, even over Android. The iOS advantage comes from the network of credit cards Apple has stored on their servers. Almost everyone who owns an iOS device has a payment method already in Apple’s database that enables 1-click purchasing. Nothing quite like it exists on the internet in terms of ease of use. PayPal is possibly a viable competitor for Android, Google Checkout seemingly has not been.

And then there’s distribution. Right now a top free app in the app store gets hundreds of thousands of downloads a day. Multiple apps achieve this milestone every week. It’s extremely hard to do this on the web, and it would probably be even harder on the mobile web. There’s no one central place where people can see all of the cool new websites every day, sorted by category, and ranked and reviewed by other users. The App Store is the Amazon of native apps, and there’s just nothing like that for web apps.

Web apps have other distribution methods, of course, that are a mixed bag. Search, recommendations, Facebook/Twitter connect, etc., offer unique advantages and disadvantages over the centralized app store model. But I can’t think of one mobile web app that’s achieved mass market success yet the old-fashioned way. Most mobile web apps are simply extensions of already existing desktop web apps. If anyone is having any success yet trying to change this I have somehow missed hearing about it. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen either, but it’s going to be a long hard slog from here to a world where mobile web apps can compete with native ones for users.

If anything what we’re seeing right now is the opposite of what Fred is predicting, with web apps going native. Apple’s new Mac App Store is trying very hard to push things in the opposite direction. Magazines like Time, Wired, The Economist, and new ones like Project are launching iPad apps that could easily, from a technological perspective have been web apps. They’re doing it for the same advantages of monetization and distribution that native apps enjoy. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see Microsoft do something similar with Windows soon, and if they don’t OEMs will.

As long as Apple remains an influential player, they’ll keep abusing and improving those advantages, especially the last two, and maybe even restricting the technology available to HTML5 to keep control over what’s running on their devices. All Apple has to do to ensure that the majority of apps remain native is not support WebGL and/or Flash.

Apple has strong financial incentives to see a healthy app store. It monetizes directly and it also drives hardware sales. Try as hard as you might, you can’t hammer “there’s an HTML5 app on the web that runs on any phone including ours for that” into a catchy slogan.

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