Openness and the social web

A recur­ring theme for me is the dif­fi­culty of keep­ing mar­kets “open,” in the sense of empow­er­ing cus­tomers and users with infor­ma­tion and choice, while still per­mit­ting busi­nesses to grow and innovate.

This con­cern under­lies my inter­est in dis­trib­u­tive jus­tice, lim­it­ing copy­right and patent monop­o­lies, open-​​source soft­ware and open-​​access pub­lish­ing. I try not to fall too far to one side of the debate, but rather am a pro­po­nent of a bal­anced approach to these issues so that the “free mar­ket” can func­tion effec­tively to grow GDP while pro­tect­ing human rights, eth­i­cal val­ues, and so on.

Chris Messina hits on this theme in The open, social web:

For me, open­ness is about free­dom of choice and unfet­tered access to com­pete in an open mar­ket­place. To that end, you still must pro­tect against monop­o­lis­tic threats, which can jeop­ar­dize entry to mar­kets and there­fore require regulation.

In the post­ing, he brings in some eco­nomic con­cepts from Beril Hatt’s Ph.D. work that, he believes, are nec­es­sary to “defeat monop­o­lies in social net­works and cloud-​​based markets”:

• data porta­bil­ity: related to switch­ing costs; an exam­ple of this is phone num­ber porta­bil­ity (which require gov­ern­ment inter­ven­tion to achieve)
• multi-​​homing: increas­ing reli­a­bil­ity through par­al­leliza­tion; the exam­ple I used was ping​.fm, which allows you to pub­lish con­tent simul­ta­ne­ously to mul­ti­ple des­ti­na­tions, thereby defeat­ing net­work exclu­siv­ity and lock-​​in
• roam­ing: have access to and using other people’s net­works; I showed a text mes­sage that I received from AT&T explain­ing how they wanted to charge me $20/​MB while roam­ing in Europe. Clearly net­works don’t like it when their cus­tomers roam!
• dis­ag­gre­ga­tion: ser­vice sub­sti­tutabil­ity; in this case the photo-​​editing ser­vice Picnik imports pho­tos from a mul­ti­tude of sources, avoid­ing tightly cou­pling itself an any one par­tic­u­lar ser­vice, unlike Facebook’s photo-​​sharing ser­vice, which can only be used and accessed on face​book​.com.