C. Warren Axelrod writes: Judging from the 45 readers’ comments in response to the July 20, 2009 Op-Ed article “Lost in the Cloud” by Jonathan Zittrain, he hit a number of raw nerves. Zittrain is a Harvard law professor and author of “The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It.”
Alongside his valid concerns regarding privacy and security in the cloud, Zittrain makes the questionable statement that “… the most difficult challenge – both to grasp and to solve – of the cloud is its effect on our freedom to innovate.”
The basic arguments for Professor Zittrain’s case against the cloud, and in favor of personal computers, are roughly as follows:
- Anyone can write code for the PC and sell it or give it away
- The competition from other producers of word processors and browsers, for example, keeps Microsoft honest
- Thousands of applications are developed by “tinkerers and hackers” (hackers?) on their PCs
Zittrain argues that the cloud environment does not permit the above activities, since companies such as Facebook, Apple and, to a lesser extent, Google, are crimping innovation through their restrictiveness.
Even though Zittrain mentions that Amazon.com offers a cloud infrastructure, which allows customers the freedom to develop their own software, his major focus is on those companies that are considered to be protective of their proprietary environments.
It is very difficult to anticipate which types of service providers will dominate the cloud. In the opinion of one of the commenters, the cloud “… is simply a revamp of ASP (as was seen around 2000).” According to another, it is “… [full circle back to … timesharing off mainframes.” To some extent they are correct. And I didn’t notice a slowing down of innovation because of timesharing … quite the reverse.
The current wisdom is that the cloud does (and will) offer a wide range of services, including software, platform and infrastructure services, only the first of which threatens to restrict what developers may do. But this is not new. There have been, and continue to be, proprietary software service vendors and they have clearly not hampered innovation in the past.
A similar set of arguments surrounds “net neutrality.” Proponents suggest that any restrictions or preferential treatment on the Internet will be detrimental to innovation as the larger players will dominate the Web and push out smaller start-ups. Interestingly, the so-called destroyers of innovation in the net-neutrality case are seen to be the large telecommunications companies, such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, who oppose net neutrality and want to impose various tiers of online service, which they would control and charge for. The supporters of net neutrality include many of the large Web presences, such as Google, and its subsidiary YouTube, Amazon and Yahoo. Facebook carries a “causes” site for the support of net neutrality.
So what’s wrong with this picture? On the one hand, a number of large Web providers, who are jockeying for cloud business, are for net neutrality, which is claimed to promote innovation, but those same companies are seen as restrictive with respect to what they will allow into their cloud software services, which stymies innovation according to Zittrain.
The truth of the matter is that innovation will flourish whether or not the Internet is “neutral” and whether or not cloud software-as-a-service providers restrict the applications that they accept for their platforms. Man’s creativity will inevitably work around any barriers to progress. In particular, the cloud does offer a range of services, from software to platforms to infrastructure, which enable small and start-up companies to access vast computing resources, which heretofore were way beyond their reach, on a pay-for-use basis. This is, in my view, an innovation enabler of unprecedented power. And, furthermore, the local PC model is not going away for many years to come, so that, even if you believe, which I don’t, that the transfer to the cloud will inhibit innovation in the long run, there will still remain many choices well into the future. And by then an entirely new model will likely prevail.