The Open Contract
Fred Wilson makes an excellent case for why users should be more aware of where their data is being harvested. He raises concerns about Google’s aggressive march toward what can be loosely described as a data monopoly, where the scale of the pool of data creates a barrier to entry points for the startups Fred so ably funds and arbitrages. We can forgive his wrapping this economic imperative in a clarion call for the protection of innovation, but his point is valid as far as it goes.
How far that is depends on what you think about what he calls open data. Here’s how Fred puts it:
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We need an open data movement, but that may not be enough. We may also need a platform shift. The web seems so much like an end state that it is hard to imagine what that platform shift might look like or when it might happen. I am not going to predict the nature or the timing of this platform shift, but I will point out one thing. The data that drives all of the most valuable web services is contributed by users as they interact with these services. The shift that unlocks another era of innovation will occur when users begin to understand their role in this ecosystem and have the tools at hand to direct what is now an unconscious contribution in a way that insures continued innovation on their behalf.
This sounds right on the surface; who could be against open data? Who could reject the notion that we have a right to control what happens to our behavioral data when we emit it around the network? Well, the answer for some time now is Web companies have offered services for “free” that carry an implied contract: ‘you get the software, you give us the data.’ The contract to date has not been ‘you get the software, you give us the data, we give you the data back so you can take it elsewhere.’
Part of the reason that hasn’t happened is that people have been happy with Gmail and Google Apps and Google Reader and so on. The lock-in has been user-mandated, a virtual frequent flier program: ‘you keep making it better; I’ll book more flights.’ ‘You make it all work best on the iPhone and I’ll trust you some more.’ After all, the guy who’s sounding the alarm here is responding to a lock-out not of users, but the competitive dynamics of his business. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong, just not necessarily a proxy for the user. Thus the save-the-innovation theme.
Indeed, the other recent alarm about open data, in this case the social graph crisis, was sounded by Google itself, in apparent response to Facebook’s approaching a strategic (and hard-to-dislodge) developer monopoly in the social network layer. Again, users continue to vote in great numbers for Facebook’s contract, suggesting that in the absence of a competitive contract offering, why change? As long as no credible counter-offer appears, privacy and loss of data control are offset by the notion of ‘I signed a contract and I’ll keep delivering as long as they do.’
So the politics of open are trumped by the fair play of good price for good service. Microsoft achieved its hegemony by subsidizing the cost of word processing while building in presentation, spreadsheet, multimedia, networking, and eventually the operating system formerly know as Windows (the browser), all for a commodity price less than the original single app. Software became electricity. We bundle electricity with the rent or mortgage and taxes, or at least think of it that way.
Fred: “what is now an unconscious contribution.” Not so sure about that Fred. At each stage of what you call platform shift, the user knows full well what the contract is. When Office was built out, I couldn’t hurry fast enough to kill WordPerfect and Lotus and even Netscape with abandon. Short-sighted? Perhaps, but Netscape morphed into Google somehow in spite of the great evisceration, didn’t it. Dave Winer and a few stubborn just-good-enoughers outlasted enough of the groovebusters to see the day when a single laptop can generate content that will ultimately stand alongside the media industries as equal and in some cases dominant partners. That laptop may be a Mac or an iPhone and we may struggle with the contract from time to time, but unconscious? No.
If not unconscious then what? I’ve sat in a conference room for a long afternoon with Fred, and I doubt he’s looking around for someone to crack open Google or Facebook or fight his battles for him. He’s smart and direct and comfortable with stating his case without a lot of indirection. But the tone of his pitch to users is that they need to become more aware of their power in supporting a platform shift that he doesn’t make a case for (he’s saving that prediction for his partners perhaps.) The pitch again: contribute [our] data in ways that insure continued innovation on [our] behalf.
That says to me, keep doing what you’re doing, support apparently closed platforms like Apple and data moats like Google and identity gulags like Facebook, and not wait around for the empty promise of an open data movement. It obviously seems counter-intuitive and politically suicidal, but so far I’ve moved my data from one to the next just in time to take advantage of a Golden Age of opportunity and leverage that from all signs is in its early stages. I’m not looking for Fred or anybody else to insure continued innovation on my behalf; I’m counting on Fred to insure it on his behalf. I’ll take it from there.
We don’t need to mandate open data; it’s already ours to begin with. We don’t have to threaten Google if they start acting untrustworthy, as they are doing with the muddy tying of an opt-out-less “friending” link between Gtalk and Google Reader shared feeds. Instead, we just vote with our feet by pruning those contacts that are serendipitous and not necessarily worth sharing out gestures with without some more stable two-way contract. In other words, we back out of the mini-contract until Google refreshes our confidence in their judgment. The contract is self-correcting. We have to keep the contract open; the data is already ours.
