Slate has a helpful article by legal scholar Tim Wu (among other things, an expert on Internet-related policy issues) about what’s at stake concerning Google’s recent announcement about the development of Android, a “truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices”.
{ 29 comments }
abb1 11.19.07 at 3:01 pm
So, are they going to make money by broadcasting ads to your google-phone?
Seth Finkelstein 11.19.07 at 3:08 pm
“The Googlefather” will make you an offer you can’t ignore (you might be able to refuse it, but you sure can’t escape it).
tom s. 11.19.07 at 3:32 pm
abb1: It’s no secret – ads is exactly what they are going to do. Technically, there are two features in Android that are obviously geared to this:
– translucency in the graphics. So you can show ads without taking up screen space by overlaying them on top of whatever it is you really want to see.
– a scrolling-text bar at the top of the screen for those pithy few-word ads you want to show.
BTW, the “openness” part is a shell game really.
Steve LaBonne 11.19.07 at 3:39 pm
Being “rescued” from Verizon and AT&T by Google would be rather like being resucued from Jack the Ripper by Hannibal Lecter.
Bill Gardner 11.19.07 at 3:57 pm
Being “rescued†from Verizon and AT&T by Google would be rather like being resucued from Jack the Ripper by Hannibal Lecter.
Because…?
Steve LaBonne 11.19.07 at 4:07 pm
Because Google has repeatedly demonstrated that it has left its “don’t be evil” days far behind. See Tom S.’s comment for how that will likely play out in this particular arena.
Steve LaBonne 11.19.07 at 4:09 pm
P.S. There is already a genuinely open mobile OS. It’s called “Linux”.
Walt 11.19.07 at 4:09 pm
Steve: According to the article at least, Google’s OS _is_ Linux.
Symbian 11.19.07 at 4:14 pm
I think Google Android will fail.
Steve LaBonne 11.19.07 at 4:14 pm
Indeed, its based on Linux. But since there are Linux-based phones right now, exactly who needed Google in the equation? To have true open cell phones you want Linux, period, without the “value” (i.e. ads) added by Google.
Bill Gardner 11.19.07 at 4:29 pm
Because Google has repeatedly demonstrated that it has left its “don’t be evil†days far behind.
Steve, the question is sincere: I know just about nothing about Google’s business practices. Is it just the ads?
roger 11.19.07 at 4:32 pm
The problem is that the article is in slate. And since slate’s editor, William Saletan, has lately been pushing KKK propaganda about the ‘lower intelligence’ of blacks, it takes a strong stomach to go to that site anymore. Lawyers guns and money has been keeping up with Saletan’s racist binge so you don’t have to. Funny though how anti-black prejudice has been normalized, so there is no stink about this at all, whereas if Saletan wrote a couple of columns asking, say, Do Jews inherit a gene that makes them greedy for money, there would be at least some polite chatter that we are dealing with a bigot.
Neel Krishnaswami 11.19.07 at 4:39 pm
Bill: probably the most ethically-problematic thing that Google has done is help the Chinese government’s censor the Internet. That’s kind of definitionally evil.
Nevertheless, Tim Wu is right. The Bell system is pretty much an object lesson in why close corporate-government partnerships inevitably involve pervasive corruption; there’s not much to choose from when considering Verizon or Haliburton. The model Google is pushing is still an improvement over them.
Steve LaBonne 11.19.07 at 4:39 pm
See for example European antitrust investigation over Doubleclick acquisition. It’s not that there’s anything uniquely bad about Google’s constant drive to expand revenues by expanding the reach of its ads, it’s just that Google is no more (or less) altruistic than any other big corporation bent on expanding its domain. So there’s no reason a priori to assume that consumers would be a lot better off in a future gPhone-dominated market than in today’s (in the US) Verizon / AT&T dominated one.
tom s. 11.19.07 at 6:45 pm
Google is a monopoly-in-the-making and will inevitably take on the characteristics of those other monopolies it displaces. Their talk of openness and friendliness comes to a halt when it comes to things you would think innocuous like talking about how much water it takes to cool their servers. More
here.
Matt Kuzma 11.19.07 at 6:52 pm
I sense a lot of really shallow Google-hate in the comments so far. The openness is not a shell game; they really are making a platform for open development. There are no hidden biases towards their products, and if they deploy a mobile application with obtrusive ads, a rival application will soon replace it. Google really does encourage competition in exactly the way that Microsoft and the Bells stifle it. The various Google products to date have been so successful precisely because they are good and while they have ads and they make Google a lot of money, the market really has demonstrated that, on balance, Google’s solutions are better.
As for why this is better than Linux, it has everything to do with market share. You only get good apps if you have a critical mass of developers and consumers to create a vibrant market. In its entire history, Linux has failed to do that and it still isn’t a real solution, especially not in the mobile world. You may be happy as can be with a Linux phone, but the fact is that most people won’t be. Android will fulfill all the potential that Linux could never realize because its development community and user base is peopled entirely by arrogant snobs who can’t be bothered to make things accessible to the common user.
abb1 11.19.07 at 7:04 pm
I got nothing against google, but once you allow opensource software and get real competition going among the service providers – then, I reckon, there’s simply no money to be made off this gadget. Something has to give.
Walt 11.19.07 at 7:06 pm
Matt, complaints about shallow Google hatred is much less compelling when followed by shallow Linux hatred.
uptown 11.19.07 at 7:22 pm
Got to spend their billions somewhere.
Colin Danby 11.19.07 at 7:47 pm
Re #9, how do I get a Linux phone? I did a quick search but see nothing consumer-ready.
Neel at #12 seems right on all points. Matt at #15 merits a better response.
tom s. 11.19.07 at 7:48 pm
matt – in what way is Google making a platform for open development? The Android SDK does not look particularly open to me – any more than various Microsoft SDKs.
Steve LaBonne 11.19.07 at 8:02 pm
You can’t get (yet) get one in the US, but I believe they are available in some other countries. Certainly their development is a lot farther along than android’s!
SG 11.20.07 at 2:22 pm
I am bothered by the increasing dominance of advertising as a business model in itself. Advertising to me seems parasitic. As a medium for information, not only does advertising have a strong disincentive to tell the truth, but the main means of testing the truth of the information (from buying and using the product) shifts the test of its truthfulness downstream from the producer of the advertising. Combining that with a monopoly like google that bases its profits on free access for those liars seems dangerous. Also, on top of that, advertising generally is the lowest form of culture (outside of the wingnet, anyway) and I do wonder about what it means about our culture that we are so willing to give it the license we have.
I am particularly thinking here of the “live” coverage of AFL in Australia, the way google sends adverts into my email, that sort of thing. I wonder if there is a better model of the internet out there, and we are missing it because the dominance of players like google has prevented us seeing it. And I don’t think a free phone based on advertising is going to help us see the forest for the trees.
Peter Clay 11.20.07 at 4:34 pm
The real money for Google will come when they sell out the back end of their database of personal information. By that point people will be so invested in GoogleWorld (using it for all their email, documents, phone books, files, photographs, software, social networking, blogs etc), that changing will be hard; and even if you do switch, they still have a copy of all your data.
Slocum 11.20.07 at 4:45 pm
I got nothing against google, but once you allow opensource software and get real competition going among the service providers – then, I reckon, there’s simply no money to be made off this gadget. Something has to give.
Huh? Google makes vast sums of money on an open source platform with real competition. You can run any web browser on any computing platform and as long as you use google.com for searches (with Google ads) and google is perfectly happy.
So google has every reason to believe it could make money in an open phone platform environment, but also reason to worry that companies like Verizon (all your ring tones are belong to us) will use control over closed platforms to monopolize the business.
voyou 11.20.07 at 5:56 pm
By that point people will be so invested in GoogleWorld (using it for all their email, documents, phone books, files, photographs, software, social networking, blogs etc), that changing will be hard; and even if you do switch, they still have a copy of all your data.
This is entirely on the money. The problem with Android is less likely that it won’t really be open; an open source phone stack is a perfectly good free razor for Google to use to sell razor blades (i.e., its ad-revenue-generating web services). The worry is that an open phone is not much comfort if your data is all stored by closed web services. This isn’t just a problem with Google, of course, it applies to Facebook, MySpace and lots of “Web 2.0” stuff.
There’s a small but growing group of people in the free software world thinking about how the principles of open-ness that guide free software could be applied to web services. See, for instance, Luis Villa’s attempt to define “Open Services”
abb1 11.20.07 at 6:19 pm
Slocum, yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying; the only way for them to make money is to sell ads.
I’m not so sure about them selling your personal information to a third party, it might be illegal. They’ll probably use it to fine-tune their ads for you.
S 11.20.07 at 7:04 pm
One thing that I think Google is working hard at is ensuring that consumers know that their data is not “locked up” inside Google the way it is with some other web/PC software companies. They’ll happily store/index your information, but they’ve worked really well to create open interfaces for export and import to standard formats (email access, document export, photo export, etc).
Luis 11.20.07 at 7:10 pm
The worry is that an open phone is not much comfort if your data is all stored by closed web services.
To be more specific, the philosophical goal of free software is to increase user autonomy. If your phone has free software which speaks only to closed services, not much autonomy is gained, because your data (and in the facebook/myspace case, your online identity) is in the end controlled by another party over whom you have very little leverage.
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