Archive for June 5th, 2008

The WSJ reports a surge of outside interest in the African telecommunications firms. With a population of nearly 1 billion people and a mobile phone penetration below 30%, the potentials for growth are astounding. Many non-African players are recognizing this including American hedge funds, British telecom giant Vodafone and Indian investors. Notably absent are American carriers including Verizon who today announced the purchase of Alltel to become America’s largest mobile-phone company.

In a way, I’m happy that AT&T et al. are not getting involved in Africa. They have shown a failure to innovate in the USA and using their billions to buy a stake in a quickly evolving market would likely lead to stagnation. I hope that the new players, regardless of location, recognize the need for investment to build out the networks and technologies in Africa.

One of the questions I’ve been kicking around since getting back from Berkman@10 has been one raised by Jonathan Zittrain’s book, The Future of the Internet. As I noted back when I reviewed it, JZ’s premise is that increasingly, vendors are selling locked-down, sterile devices to willing consumers who are fearful of the negative effects of generativity – spam, spyware, viruses.

In parallel with this shift towards sterility has been a push-back by those with the technical skills to hack their devices for additional functionality. With Linux or Wikipedia, the user is encouraged to hack, edit and create. With the iPhone or TiVo, the opposite is true and we are expected to accept what Steve Jobs or another executive decides. This has not been accepted happily by all and many are unlocking their iPhones or other sterile devices.

This “forced generativity” might seem like a protection against sterility – no device can be fully locked down and users are bound to open them incrementally. When I asked JZ this during a Washington Post discussion, his answer pointed out an important qualification: this forced generativity is increasingly contingent upon avoiding centrally controlled updates which can re-sterilize freed iPhones or TiVos.

Zittrain also laments that not everyone has the technical skill to force generativity, saying “I don’t want a world where only the hackers get Get Out of Jail Free cards, and where everyone else risks serious crossfire to break out of a sterile platform.” I think this is an important point, but not necessarily the entire truth. Of course, technically-inclined folks are more likely to be able to avoid sterility, but aren’t they the people who can take advantage of generativity in the first place? Hackers are the ones adding to Linux and using the neutral Internet to create new web services.

However, anecdotal evidence would suggest that more than just hackers force sterility. For example, Jan Chipchase (NYT profile), a cultural anthropologist who studies the use of mobile phones in the developing world, has written about “cultures of repair.” If you travel around the developing world (and to a lesser extent, richer nations), you will encounter a massive industry dedicated to mobile phone augmentation. Chipchase writes, “Aside from the scale of what’s on sale there is a thriving market for device repair services ranging from swapping out components to re-soldering circuit boards to reflashing phones in a language of your choice , naturally.” These are not just repairs; at times they come very close to doing what American hackers do with the iPhone – they add functionality and opportunity. And it isn’t just the technically minded, its the poorest of the poor:

“The informal repair services that are offered are quite simply driven by necessity – highly price sensitive customers cannot afford to go through more expensive official customer care centers and even if they could their phones are unlikely to be covered by warrantee – having been bought through grey market channels, been sent as gifts from friends and relatives abroad, or were locally bought used, second or third+ ownership.”

What is happening is a broad effort to force generativity upon an industry which is woefully sterile. The warrantees, contracts, networks and devices of the mobile telecommunications sector reek of sterility. People, and not just hackers, are pushing back.

Perhaps the real conclusion from this small quibble is that people do want and are capable of utilizing generativity. Efforts to control too much will be rejected or augmented.