unfinished work

An Open Letter to Bob Latta of Ohio.

Wed, 04 Jun 2014 11:48:51 -0400

Hi Mr. Latta,

I’m a 24-year-old go-getter from New York, living in Los Angeles, and I want to have my own TV show someday. Only, I don’t want it to be on TV. I want it to be online, so that I can have control over its content, which is something a television network can’t really allow.

…

I hope more young people who have never known what it is like to ask permission to promote your work, your vision, or you idea, will realize how lucky they have been and how important it is to preserve an open Internet

Should The Web Have An Editorial Board

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:02:00 -0500

In an Op-ed in today’s New York Times, Cary H. Sherman, the chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, accused the tech industry of overstating the risks of the proposed PIPA/SOPA legislation and described the protest by popular web sites as a misuse of power, saying in part.

“The hyperbolic mistruths, presented on the home pages of some of the world’s most popular Web sites, amounted to an abuse of trust and a misuse of power. When Wikipedia and Google purport to be neutral sources of information, but then exploit their stature to present information that is not only not neutral but affirmatively incomplete and misleading, they are duping their users into accepting as truth what are merely self-serving political declarations.

As it happens, the television networks that actively supported SOPA and PIPA didn’t take advantage of their broadcast credibility to press their case. That’s partly because “old media” draws a line between “news” and “editorial.” Apparently, Wikipedia and Google don’t recognize the ethical boundary between the neutral reporting of information and the presentation of editorial opinion as fact”.

Leaving aside his characterization of the impact of piracy and even his description of downloading as theft which are gross simplifications of complex issues, Cary poses an interesting question. In a world where everyone is a publisher, should consumers expect publishers to separate news and editorial? This framing suggests that a couple of interesting things about Cary’s worldview. It embeds a quaint assumption that information consumers are naive enough to believe that traditional media never mixes reporting and opinion. It also suggests that he does not understand how information is created on the web, or that he pines for an earlier era when high minded editorial boards, who controlled a tiny number of news outlets, told us what to think.

The thing Cary does not mention about the SOPA/PIPA protest is that Wikipedia and Google were only two of 115,000 websites that blacked out for the day. In most cases blacked out sites linked to a wide variety of sources that explained the concerns about the PIPA/SOPA legislation. No one decided who would black out or how the concerns would be presented or by whom. This was a very broad based collection of diverse sites that came together spontaneously out of a common concern for the risks of well meaning but misguided legislation.

The opposition was not orchestrated by Google. I know from conversations with their policy team there is no way they would have blacked out their banner if they were the only site to do so.

It was also not orchestrated by Wikipedia. They arrived at their decision to black out their site through a remarkably open but entirely internal process. If you follow the debate on this wiki, it is hard to find any hint of “corporate” self interest. In fact, one of the biggest arguments put forward by wikipedians opposed to the move was that the blackout would hurt Wikipedia. The advocates were willing to take that risk to defend a principle.

Last fall concerns about PIPA/SOPA were voiced, by entrepreneurs, technologists, constitutional scholars, and venture capitalists, but there was so little coverage of these concerns from traditional media outlets, that congressmen could claim in December that “no one opposes these bills”. That news black out would certainly seem to be in the interests of media companies pushing more aggressive copyright protection, but we will never know if that was their motivation because unlike Wikipedia, traditional media companies did not invite us to participate in the discussion.

Cary seems to think that January 18th will be remembered as the day responsible media descended into mob chaos. I think it will be remembered as the day it became clear that participatory media was real, was here to stay, and would be a force to be reckoned with.

I Believe In The Internet - The Content Industry Doesn't

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 10:34:00 -0500

I have always believed that the entertainment industry’s effort to stop piracy by asking search engines and ISPs to make it more difficult for their users to find pirate sites was the wrong way to solve the problem, but it could never put my finger on why I felt so strongly about it. After all, the entertainment industry argues that they are only targeting the worst pirates and are only asking for help because those pirates are offshore and out of the reach of U.S. authorities.

At a dinner earlier this week, Joi Ito, the head of the Media Lab at MIT described the Internet as a “belief system” and I suddenly understood. The Internet is not just a series of pipes. It’s core architecture embeds an assumption about human nature. The Internet is designed to empower individuals not control them. It assumes that the if individuals are empowered, they will do the right thing the vast majority of the time. Services like eBay, Craigslist, Etsy and AirBnB are built on the assumption that most people are honest. Other services like Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, Wordpress, and Soundcloud assume people will be generous with their ideas, insights and creations. Wikipedia has proven that people will share their knowledge. Companies like Kickstarter show that people will even be generous with their money. This does not mean that there are not bad people out there. All of these companies spend a lot of time and money to battle spam and fraud. The companies are simply betting that there are many more good people than bad. The architecture of the Internet shares this assumption. It could have been designed to prevent bad behavior. Instead its design empowers good behavior.

The entertainment industry does not share this view of human nature. I recently suggested to a friend at Viacom that one possible solution to the offshore piracy problem would be to have browsers launch a pop-up with a warning the way they do for phishing sites. Something like THE ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES HAS DETERMINED THAT THIS SITE HOSTS UNAUTHORIZED COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL. DOWNLOADING MATERIAL FROM THIS SITE MAY BE ILLEGAL. If that warning included a link where the user could find the content and purchase it legally at a fair price, I believe it would make a big dent on piracy.

My friend disagreed. He said that users would just see the warning as confirmation they were in the right place. He cited other examples of moral failing suggesting that he believes that in general people will take advantage of others if given the chance. I think something else is going on. I believe that downloaders are making a moral calculation and coming to the conclusion that the content industry immorally perpetuates an artificial scarcity to maximize their profits at the expense of users and artists. They understand that content is a non-rival good, that unlike an apple, they can consume it without diminishing anyone else’s ability to consume the same thing. They know that the content owner paid nothing to reproduce or distribute the content on the Internet. They also know that the artists who created the original content get a tiny fraction of the revenue. So they are making a moral judgement that the content owners are pricing their product to extract unjustifiable profits and they feel morally justified taking the content they find out there on the web.

Whether you agree with me that the vast majority of people are good or with my friend that given a chance many people will steal is not really important. What is important is that PIPA, and SOPA, the legislation the content industry is currently pushing through Congress, will not allow me to architect a service and build a relationship with consumers that reflects my core beliefs about human nature. If I am a search engine and I remove sites from my index, I am essentially lying to my users. If I am a social media site and I remove links my users have posted to sites that some authority has deemed illegal, I am breaking a promise.

I am sympathetic to the content industries struggles with piracy, but my belief system tells me the answer is to capitalize on the great strengths of the Internet to create a healthy and profitable relationship with their users not to sue them. No matter how strongly I believe that, however, I do not think I have the right to tell them how to run their business. Apparently, they do not feel the same way about our businesses. The current legislation in Congress does not just create an administrative burden, it requires service providers who have built wonderful businesses on a deep conviction about human nature to change their relationship with their users in a way that subverts their core values.

Unfortunately, this legislation may pass. The content Industry has invested heavily to get it through. Legislators need to hear from every entrepreneur and every user who understands that the Internet is more than a set of pipes. They need to hear that innovation and economic development comes from empowering users not constraining them. You can learn more here. You can make your voice heard by participating in American Censorship Day. Please make yourself heard.

Big Data

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 14:26:39 -0400

I attended a meetup last night hosted by Chris Dixon an led by Roger Ehrenberg on the topic of big data. There was a lot of talk about algorithms, machine learning, and key value pairs, but as the evening wore on, I became more convinced that these are tools and the big wins still come from understanding humans more than understanding machines

I pushed for an example of a consumer facing web service where the consumers experience as meaningfully improved through the use of “big data” techniques. The best answer was Google, but everyone quickly acknowledged that page rank was people powered. Yes, it is possible to do citation analysis at scale because we now have the horsepower and data structures but people provide the powerful insight. I also learned that the big wins in the Netflix algorithm challenge did not come from better algorithms, it came from better classification. The winners added “high brow” and “low brow” as categories of movies. Google language translation was another example but apparently they used humans to train the algorithm.

Someone asked about Shazam and Chris Wiggins of Columbia pointed out that it was a really “coarse” algorithm. In other words they radically simplified the problem before turning the computers loose.

I came away thinking that the big breakthroughs will continue to be driven by human insight. Sophisticated data analysis will open up new opportunities for human insight but we will still need to put our wet brains to use to cover the last mile.

What is the next big investment idea?

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 09:08:37 -0400

All of us at USV hate that question. The interrogator is expecting a crisp answer - wireless, local, realtime, or video. In an earlier era, they might have expected gigabit routers, gallium arsenide chips, high capacity flash memory. There’s the problem. The next big thing is becoming increasingly abstract. It used to be hardware, then it was software, then web services of various kinds, but even as moves away from technology and toward human nature, people still cling to crisp technological descriptions.

Fred yesterday, said he now answers the question with a quick recap of the current buzzwords, but then says it is none of the above, rather it is the soup that is created when you mix all these technologies together with lots of users. That is the right answer, but unsatisfying to someone who wants a headline.

Headlines

Fri, 28 May 2010 15:20:33 -0400

I had an interesting conversation last night about headlines. It started when someone made the observation that the headlines at the Huffington Post were increasingly misleading. Users were beginning to get frustrated when they click through to a story that turned out to be different than expected. As we dug into it, we decided that it was an artifact of the editorial process at the HuffPo. Headlines compete in a Darwinian process for space and time on the homepage in part based on the number of readers who click through, so editors are incented to bait and switch.

The knee jerk reaction to this problem would be to bring back human editorial control to improve the user’s experience, but that may not be necessary. In the same conversation, an editor at HuffPo and one at ABCNews.com confirmed that passed links are their fastest growing source of traffic. A HuffPo editor might be able to fool a reader into clicking through but the people you follow on Twitter are only going to recommend articles of substance.

Ecosystem Management - Is Control Good or Bad

Mon, 04 May 2009 22:28:00 -0400

Two posts in the same day illustrate the problems at either extreme of ecosystem management on the web.

Apple exerts too much control

Firefox too little

Is there an obvious middle ground that doesn’t create a big management burden? Is there a technical, or architectural solution that would lead to good behavior with out requiring a human referee?

I can’t say what the solution might be. I suspect it will combine clever architecture, good incentive structure, and some crowd sourced human oversight. But I sure hope there is a solution otherwise we are staring at a fundamental limitation of the web.

Cool stop motion - lots of work

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:31:18 -0400

Cool stop motion - lots of work

Where You Stand Depends On Where You Sit

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:56:49 -0400

Over the weekend, David Carr of the New York Times lost it. He published a piece in the Sunday New York Times in which he suggested a last ditch survival strategy for newspapers.

His suggestion:

Put up a pay wall
Shut out the search engines
Say no to cut rate digital ads
Merge weak papers in local markets

The emotion in the piece felt like an anguished cry from someone cares passionately about the civic role of the newspaper as well as its economic viability.

I am sympathetic. It takes informed citizens for a democracy to thrive. Newspapers used to be the dominant source of news. The whole point of laws agaisnt the consolidation of news outlets in local markets is based on the need to preserve multiple voices. Yes, it is important that information be broadly accessible. Yes, it is important that voters have access to multiple points of view. But no - that does not require that newspapers as we know them continue to exist.

The reality is that the newspaper industry, despite its long, important, even noble service to our democracy is no longer too big to fail. There are already enough news outlets to ensure access to information and to multiple points of view. There will be more in the future.

So I’d be ok if the newspaper industry adopted all of David suggestions and would be happy if the FCC waived all the media concentration rules to make it happen. It would, unfortunately, have the effect of accerating their irrelavance. That would be too bad because, there is still an important role for news gathering and analysis, and the best reporting would be lost to us during a period of transition before new models emerge.

David’s righteous indignation over the role of search engines in the newspapers demise is way over the top. His peice suggests that search engines have unfairly appropriated the content of newspapers and undermined their business models. He suggests that if they all band together and refuse to allow search engines to index their content, the problem would be solved. He says this as if it is completely obvious that the appropriation of their content by search engines is at the very least immoral and should be illegal. And that newspapers should have every right to collude to deny search engines access to this content.

To me, it’s not so clear. What if sources were to come to the same conclusion. What if everyone who supplies information to a reporter decided that newspapers were unfairly capitalizing on their information and insights. What if they decided collectively to withhold that information so that news papers could not continue to unfairly profit from thier information.

Looked at that way, it seems like the value in newspapers is less about the facts and more about the aggregation (and interpretation) of those facts. That search engines are now aggregating newspapers seems less like the heist of the century and more like the natural, inevitable, and ultimately positive creative destruction of capitalism.

I Hope Larry Lessig is Wrong

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 10:21:01 -0500

Steven Johnson moderated a conversation between Larry Lessig and Shepard Fairey last night at the New York Public Library. The topic was remix culture. The most interesting exchange was when Steven pointed out that remix art seemed poppy and ironic but inherently limited, and Larry replied by arguing that any art that has as big a social impact as Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster, or as the Daily Show, is not limited. Shepard piped in that throwing paint at a jet engine and seeing what lands on a canvas 30 yards away isn’t all that profound either. I think Steven and Larry may be right that broad and “shallow” may be every bit as profound as narrow and deep, and that Shepard may be right that, these days, narrow and deep is in pretty short supply anyway.

But the conversation that got me thinking was about Larry’s recent career change. He has been fighting the enclosure of the digital commons for 15 years. He told the audience that he is now focused on the corrupting influence of money in politics. He cited the example of a bill just re-introduced by Rep. Conyers of Detroit (HR 801) that would require that the results of research funded by the American taxpayer not be freely distributed. This bill is designed to protect the interests of (ironically) mostly foreign publishers. Larry went on to say that the sponsors of this bill recieved twice as much campaign funding from publishers than other congressmen.

Ok - I agree money corrupts and I can see how campaign finance reform could cleanse the debate in Washington, but I hope Larry is wrong about his career choice.

Larry left the fight for free culture at a moment that he described as the most “hopeful” ever to tilt at a new windmill. Is it possible that the old windmill, the acceleration of transparency and the furtherance of the democratizing qualities of the web are not just the key to a revitalized, engaging popular culture - they are also the key to managing the corrupting influence of money in Washington.

The fundamental problem is that the issues that are decided in Washington tend to have a diffuse impact on a large number of relatively unorganized consumers and a very direct impact on well organized commercial interests. For example, consumers are harmed by the lack of innovation in licensed spectrum but wireless carriers greatly benefit from the goverment granted monoply that protects them from competition. It is not hard to figure out why carriers are winning that fight. Consumers don’t even know what’s at stake. Carriers know not only exactly what’s at stake, but how key decisions are going to be made, by who, and what the re-election prospects (and campaign funding needs) are for the key decision makers.

I hope that the web will become the vehicle for education and engaging consumers about the key issues and that once they are engaged, it will provide a vehicle for making sure that their voices are heard. I believe that process will reduce the infuence of special interests, and increase the infuence of voters.

The web may also change the fundraising equation in Washington. If we assume that Chris Hughe’s My Obama web site is the new model for engaging activists and attracting campaign dollars, and that there is no reason that every politician at every level will not be using these techniques in the next election cycle, then the influence of special interests will be diminished.

So I hope Larry’s new focus on the corrupting influence of campaign finance reform is uneccessary, and I hope that once he gets into it, he will use his remarkable talents continue to accelerate the transparency of politics and the democratization of campaign finance that the web has enabled.

What's Like Happening to Like Culture?

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:49:31 -0400

My partner Albert complained a couple of days ago about the overuse of the word like. Like :-) Albert, I regret its over use. Like Albert, Mary and I also find ourselves constantly saying to our two ten year olds “its not like anything” - just say what you mean.

But I think there is something else going on here. I think kids today are so much more self aware than we were when we were growing up that they are uncomfortable speaking directly. By starting evrery sentence with “Like” they introduce an element of ironic distance to every utterance that signals how sophisticated they are.

I guess we will have grown through the ugly adolescence of our culture when the most sophisticated kids begin to see the usage as a crutch and drop its use to signal that they are even more sophisticated and self aware than their freinds who are still need to distance themselves from everything.

continuations:

A couple of days ago I was riding on a Metro North commuter train behind a group of teenagers who were loudly discussing something. I say something because I could not make out their topic as it was drowned out by the word “like” appearing three or more times in every sentence. Now I am generally not language obsessed and English is my second language, but the complete lack of expressiveness among the teenagers and their constant substitution of “like” for more complicated words or expressions was a bit horrifying……

To do my own little piece to stem the decline, I have now taken to correcting my kids whenever they use “like” as a meaningless filler or to avoid having to think of the correct word.

There Is A Reason For Free And It Ain't VCs

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:59:00 -0400

The most intersting thing about Hank Williams post on Friday of last week - Free Is Killing Us - Blame The VC, is the comment thread. Many people take Hank to task for what is a simplistic generalization that has little, if any, basis in fact. Dave McClure provides does a particularly efficient job of it

>>in most online business categories, it is inherently impossible to start a small self-sustaining business and to grow it.

this is just patently false, and the statement that VCs are making it hard to compete with free is just specious, at best.

Dave goes on to pick apart Hank’s argument point by point.

What surprised me, however, is that no one picked up on what I think is the central reason we see so many free web services. Several people talked about the declining cost of building and hosting a service. Some mentioned that the marginal cost to a web service of another user is often close to zero. These arguments explain why it is possible to offer a service for free many times with no VC funding, but it does not explain why people do it.

The thing that no one talked about was the relationship between the user of a service and the provider of that service - how that has changed on the web and what it means for business models. The reason so many services on the web are offered for free is that the users of the service are not customers in the traditional sense, the are the co-creators of the service. The service provider creates the environment, the users provide the content. Craigslist is a great example of this. Without users to upload the ads and police abuse, Craigslist would be much more expensive to operate. Of course the users get the service for free (mostly), they created it. You could make the argument that Craig should be paying them - that is how the newspapers ran classifieds for years. This is true of many of the most visible free services. Who provides the content at Google or Facebook? Who edits Digg? These services are govenrnance systems that regulate user generated contrtibution. They have to be free.

This is also why so many web services have or will have media business models. I did not say advertising supported business models because most people think of that narrowly - banners on pages. I said media because that implies that we are talking about a threeway. It is not just suppliers and customers. It is suppliers, customers, and sponsors. Even that is too simplistic. Most of these businesses will be supported by a third party who either wants to reach an audience (advertising, sponsorship, etc.) but others will work because the service provider can take a byproduct of their offering and sell that. A search engine could, for instance, package anonymous aggregate attention data and sell it to market researchers, or to other service providers who could then use the data to improve their offering, perhaps by filtering or relevancy ranking some part of their service.

Hank’s complaint that small businesses on the web can no longer succeed at small scale reveals a dated conception of small business, and a limited view of the transformation we are living through. The relationship between suppliers and customers is changing. So is the relationship between scale and profitability. Craigslist is a small business (23 people) but they have scale (20mm uniques).

I am not defending VC’s here. I agree that there was a lot of money thrown at web business in the 90s in an effort to get big fast. But most of the VC’s I know have a much more nuanced view today. They recognize that their best portfolio companies are cultivating an ecosystem, one that they can nourish and influence but not one they can control. Offering some services for free is part of the bargain with the co-creators of their service.

artificial scarcity

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 11:37:21 -0500

I have always hated the idea of artificial scarcity. It seems like such a waste of society’s resources. So I was surprised to stumble across an example that I could not condem out of hand.

Mary showed me the work of a photographer that she thinks is really great. I agree the work is great but learned that he prints a limited number of each image to create a market for his work. He like most photographers or print makers produces a limited set of prints. The first five are sold for $5000, the next ten for $10,000 and the last few are sold for $50,000.

Since he can produce an unlimited number of prints, my first reaction was what a waste, then I started wondering if there are examples where someone could justify limiting the amount of something even if there was zero marginal cost to produce that thing.

I can not think of a moral reason for not doing this in the case of art

Is there a business here?

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 18:15:48 -0400

Lots of folks I know set up standing queries to search for themselves on the web. It explains why Craig Newmark is so quick to comment on a post that talks about craigslist.

Personal Technology | Walt Mossberg | AllThingsD

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 10:01:06 -0400

Personal Technology | Walt Mossberg | AllThingsD:

This article by got me thinking about Apples resurgence. It makes perfect sense that the Mac would be taking market share from Windows/Intel now. We have for the first time arrived a point when PCs are good enough for most things.

Earlier, when hard drives were not big enough, graphics cards not fast enough, software not useful enough, the Intel PC and Microsoft operating system improved faster because they could capitalize on the innovations of all the entrepreneurs working around that platform. Now PCs are good enough. Additional features just make them harder to use. The premium to day is in making them easy enough so that most users can get most of the value out of the machines they already own. In this world Apple’s focus on simple integrated user experience trumps the WINTEL platforms relatively more open architecture.

So the relative social value and probably the relative stock market value of Apple vs Microsoft should have followed roughly this course. When the Mac was first introduced, Apple should have surged becasue they were showing off the capabilities of a promising medium, As people adopted PCs and became familiar enough to know what was missing the WINTEL platform shoudl have surged becasue of its superior ability ot absorb innovation from elsewhere. Once the market matured to the point that most people had most of the power and features they needed, Apple should have surged again and Wintel lagged. I wonder if the data would show that this is what happened.

An even more interesting question is how the fortunes of the more open web services will compare with those that are more closed when considered in the context of the markets maturity. In theory the closed services should have a greater impact early, but then fall behind the more open services as the need to innovate becomes more important than ease of use, and then the closed services should close the gap again once most user have most of what they need and the focus shifts again to ease of use.

what revenue

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 14:00:30 -0400

If you know the revenue model when you start it is not sufficiently disruptive to make a difference

philanthropy has a demand side problem

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 11:36:00 -0400

Kiva and DonorsChose show that the future challenge in philanthropy will be finding and vetting recipients and then measuring the impact of a gift. Kiva has an advantage because measuring success is easy. If the loan got paid back it was a success. It may not have made a huge difference in the borrowers life but they saw a reason to take the loan, and were able to pay it back. Donors choose has a more difficult problem. When you donate there you get a nice package from the recipient showing the class room and how it is used but there is no way to tell if students learned more.

DonorsChoose might be able to use a trick from the microlending world. Teachers within a school could be a circle of trust that could help vet projects and monitor results.

A reminder that there are no absolutes

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 09:39:42 -0400

I am a huge fan of the shift to server side applications development. Applications hosted on the server side can co-mingle data in ways that provide value for all of the participants in a network - think page rank. But as soon as I have settled comfortably into my server side prejudice, I stumble across something that messes up my tidy world. This time it was Xobni, the Outlook plugin that indexes the Outlook file on your desktop and provides surprisingly useful utilities based on those analytics.

You could do the same thing for Gmail but you would need an API from Google to get at the data set. Maybe they will provide it maybe they won’t. But possession is nine tenths of the law. With outlook the data is on your desktop.

So after several years of watching all of the innovative stuff coming from the server side, here is an example of where innovation is happening on the desktop.

Secrecy No Longer Works

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 16:44:37 -0400

In an open network like the internet many things get turned on their head. Yesterday an entrepreneur pointer out to me that in a world where information does not move easily you want to keep your cards close to your vest, but in a world where memes spread quickly you want to share your ideas aggressively because then you will be seen as the originator of the meme. Credit in a world of commoditized information goes to the creator.

I suppose I should say that the entrepreneur was Scott Karp. I am not sure he originated the meme but he was the carrier in my case

There Are No Open Web Services

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 11:43:32 -0400

Let’s start with a definition. A service is open when anyone can take anything (code, data, etc) from that service and do anything they want with it, without permission from anyone.

You might argue that is an extreme definition. I’d agree. But, anything less that that is not open. It is in some way managed by someone. Even open source software would not meet this definition. Most licenses prohibit folks from taking code and then incorporating that code into proprietary products without contributing their modifications back to the original open source code base. This constraint, this limitation on the openness of an open source system is considered a fair trade. It was consciously designed to perpetuate the collective value of the open source code base.

I can not think of a single open web service. Even services famous for their openness, or thier APIs like Craigslist, Facebook, del.icious, or Google have restrictions on what you can do with their data.

The question is what is the intention behind those restrictions and what is the effect.

Some service providers try to lock in their users by making it difficult for an individual end user to port their investment in one service to another. This is going to end. In networks where the users contribute a substantial amount of the content/value /energy, this adversarial relationship is unsustainable.

The more interesting problem is service providers who place restrictions on their APIs to prevent a newcomer from sucking out their entire data set and replicating their network effect. Seems reasonable but if the restrictions are to tight, they will lose the benefit of others who add value to thier users experience by innovating at the edge - think twittervision or the googlemaps/craigslist mashup. The winners here will be the service providers that strike the right balance between innovation and anarchy. Without any restrictions on the use of code and data, the integrity of the community is at risk - with too many, innovation will grind to a halt (yes I realize there is an embedded assumption here that decentralized innovation trumps centralized innovation - I am convinced it does).

The answer is that if the architecture is designed to further the interests of the community, it will thrive, if it is designed to further the interests of the community sponsor it will not.

So lets get over the idea that the goal is an open architecture. It is not. I live in Manhattan. It is a managed “architecture”. The stoplights on the street corners constrain our freedom, but we accept them because they make it possible for all of us to move around the city. Language is another model. We live in a society where I am relatively free to say what I want, but I have less freedom to change the meaning of the words I use.

So let’s stop debating whether a service is open or not and lets focus on the defining that perfect balance of freedom and structure that will result in vibrant thriving innovative communities.