Posts Tagged ‘Technology Policy’

During the tragic post-election violence in Kenya late last year, a couple of technologists with ties to Kenya created Ushahidi, an innovative web service that allows witnesses to report crisis news from their mobile phone or computer. From the Swahili word for “testimony,” this non-profit has created a platform which allows for the crowdsourcing of reporting. It has already been proven useful in South Africa to track anti-immigration violence, and I’m sure sundry other uses will pop up.

I’m really excited for the possibilities this opens up. Ushahidi was an important tool for making the crisis in Kenya more transparent and capitalizes on the mobile penetration in Africa. Allowing more people to have the ability to express what they see is an important goal and Ushahidi is doing so in an open-source way which will make this as accessible as possible to all. Congratulations to the team!

As you’ve probably heard, Google is releasing an Internet browser called Chrome. It’s an early product, but has some innovative features which will make it a compelling product for many. As others have pointed out, Chrome is much more indicative of an attack on Microsoft Windows than other browsers. If it is successful, as I imagine it will be if Google decides to promote it heavily, then it has a number of important implications not the least of which is the concerns about privacy.

Another question is the future of computing freedom. GNU, the project that started free software, is turning 25 years old, but in some ways, the specific goal of a free operating system is outdated. The move towards cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) means that more and more computing is done through the browser. In fact, as Nick Carr points out, Chrome represents Google’s effort to improve the browser. The end goal, it seems, is to replace Windows and Mac OS X with lightweight, browser-based computers. The day when computers are sold with only a browser is near; traditional programs – downloaded and installed locally – are quickly being replaced by online versions. If the browser is the OS, does Chrome (and Firefox), both free, open source browsers, represent the culmination of the goal of free software advocates?

I’m afraid not. In place of one proprietary set of code, network services provide many more. Hosting photos on Flickr? Using Gmail? Posting to Twitter? Connecting on Facebook? These services all lock in data to some extent. Tinkering is limited so customization falters. As Tim O’Reilly wrote a while back,

“Take note: All of the platform as a service plays, from Amazon’s S3 and EC2 and Google’s AppEngine to Salesforce’s force.com — not to mention Facebook’s social networking platform — have a lot more in common with AOL than they do with internet services as we’ve known them over the past decade and a half. Will we have to spend a decade backtracking from centralized approaches?”

Luckily a group of developers and activists are pushing back against this dependency on third-party lock-in. Blogging at autonomo.us these smart folks are raising the red flag and in the case of Identi.ca, creating more open services to compete with proprietary leaders. Evan Prodromou is the creator of identi.ca, a micro-blogging service which embraces computing freedom to an extent Twitter does not. Unfortunately, the network effects in play make Identi.ca a difficult success story.

So, as you try out Google Chrome, an admittedly exciting product (if it were for Mac…), keep in mind that the sites you are visiting do not embrace the same ethic as Chrome or GNU – they are the new digital silos.

Update: Thanks to Greg Grossmeier, I see another examples of a free network service – Tiny Tiny RSS is an RSS Reader like Google Reader, but it is open source and self-hosted. Check out Greg’s post about the site.

I’m a huge fan of Google. I advocate for many of their products and have converted many friends to GMail (the most recent declared her soulmate status with the web mail service only 1 day after leaving Apple Mail). But for every new user, the power that Google wields increases. An increasing number of critics are surfacing and calling for regulatory oversight (see the proposal for a Federal Search Commission), user-based push back (see TrackMeNot) or even writing a whole book about their worries (see Siva’s Googlization of Everything). Many of these concerns were outlined in a recent article by the Boston Globe about the opponents of Google.

For a number of reasons I don’t have the desire to outline, I think many of these concerns are overstated and the proposed solutions are misplaced, but it is worthwhile to have people question such an important institution in today’s world. The one concern I have about Google isn’t really a problem from their end, but really a result of a market-based decision by users to search with the familiar company. Google’s share of searches tops 60% and, in turn, they shape the public perception of truth and knowledge. I was reminded just how potent they were by a recent blog post about the design choices they make on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Decisions as apparently minor as typography, spacing and color have profound effects on the results searchers click on. In turn, people experience different information than otherwise.

Because users are choosing this, and because Google has an interest in providing the best results, and because I’m not convinced this is worse than in the past, I’m not overly concerned about their power. But it is important to bear in mind the effects of search engines in today’s world.

Paul Starr’s history of media is getting better with the page:

“…the long absence of military concern from communications policy may have helped to create the lead in telecommunications in the first place. In early nineteenth-century continental Europe, the original military conception of the telegraph impeded its commercial development. Security-minded telecommunications policies tended to militate against easily accessible, widely distributed networks, distorting both allocational priorities and architectural choices, to the disadvantage of long-term growth. A mere tool of civil society and local commerce, the telephone originally had little appeal to the military, in particular, and to the state, in general. States that were strong relative to civil society did not invest heavily in telephone service. That was the case in the major European states compared to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Similarly, the far greater domination of the state over civil society in the Soviet world helps to explain its lag relative to the West in the development of the telephone during the twentieth century. As World War I illustrated, wartime state support could generate technological innovation in communications. But it is one thing to have individual spin-offs from military projects, and quite another to have a framework for communications shaped by state-security concerns.

Although the Pentagon’s research division, DARPA, played an integral part in the creation of the net, it has developed in large part without military control. Civil society has made the Internet the amazing tool it is today, but that may be changing. Nations across the globe are developing plans to militarize the Internet and see it as an integral part of future war-making. In the USA, the Air Force has created a central command for cyberspace and has plans to continue down the path of framing the Internet’s development as a security question. Is it inevitable? Has the Internet developed enough in civil society that state control won’t harm it?

Paul Starr’s history of media is getting better with the page:

“…the long absence of military concern from communications policy may have helped to create the lead in telecommunications in the first place. In early nineteenth-century continental Europe, the original military conception of the telegraph impeded its commercial development. Security-minded telecommunications policies tended to militate against easily accessible, widely distributed networks, distorting both allocational priorities and architectural choices, to the disadvantage of long-term growth. A mere tool of civil society and local commerce, the telephone originally had little appeal to the military, in particular, and to the state, in general. States that were strong relative to civil society did not invest heavily in telephone service. That was the case in the major European states compared to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Similarly, the far greater domination of the state over civil society in the Soviet world helps to explain its lag relative to the West in the development of the telephone during the twentieth century. As World War I illustrated, wartime state support could generate technological innovation in communications. But it is one thing to have individual spin-offs from military projects, and quite another to have a framework for communications shaped by state-security concerns.

Although the Pentagon’s research division, DARPA, played an integral part in the creation of the net, it has developed in large part without military control. Civil society has made the Internet the amazing tool it is today, but that may be changing. Nations across the globe are developing plans to militarize the Internet and see it as an integral part of future war-making. In the USA, the Air Force has created a central command for cyberspace and has plans to continue down the path of framing the Internet’s development as a security question. Is it inevitable? Has the Internet developed enough in civil society that state control won’t harm it?