No ultimate outcomes

Tim Lee responds to my AOLternative history. I agree with the gist of almost everything he says with a few quibbles, for example:

Likely, something akin to a robots.txt file would have been invented that would provide electronic evidence of permission to link, and it would have been bundled by default into Apache. Sure, some commercial web sites would have refused to allow linking, but that would have simply lowered their profile within the web community, the same way the NYT’s columnists have become less prominent post-paywall.

In a fairly bad scenario it doesn’t matter what Apache does, as the web is a backwater, or Apache never happens. And in a fairly bad scenario lower profile in the web community hardly matters — all the exciting stuff would be behind AOL and similar subscription network walls. But I agree that workarounds and an eventually thriving web would probably have occurred. Perhaps lawyers did not really notice search engines and linking until after the web had already reached critical mass. Clearly they’re trying to avoid making that mistake again.

Lee’s closing:

So I stand by the words “relentless” and “inevitable” to describe the triumph of open over closed systems. I’ll add the concession that the process sometimes takes a while (and obviously, this makes my claim non-falsifiable, since I can always say it hasn’t happened yet), but I think legal restrictions just slow down the growth of open platforms, they don’t change the ultimate outcome.

Slowing down progress is pretty important, in a bad way. Furthermore, I’d make a wild guess that the future is highly dependent on initial conditions, no outcomes are inevitable by a long shot, and there is no such thing as an ultimate outcome, only a new set of initial conditions.

That’s my peeve for the day.

Grandiose example: did Communism just delay the relentless march of Russian society toward freedom and wealth?

4 Responses

  1. Tim says:

    In a fairly bad scenario it doesn’t matter what Apache does, as the web is a backwater, or Apache never happens. And in a fairly bad scenario lower profile in the web community hardly matters — all the exciting stuff would be behind AOL and similar subscription network walls.

    All the exciting stuff circa 1993 was behind AOL’s paywall. The reason the web won is that the web grew faster, thanks to the magic of network effects. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the lawyers didn’t notice search engines and linking until after critical mass had been achieved–what’s the point of suing people on an obscure network dominated by computer nerds?

    Slowing down progress is pretty important, in a bad way. Furthermore, I’d make a wild guess that the future is highly dependent on initial conditions, no outcomes are inevitable by a long shot, and there is no such thing as an ultimate outcome, only a new set of initial conditions.

    Obviously the particular course of history depends on initial conditions. But I don’t think that makes predictions about “the long run” impossible. I can’t predict the exact course the transition from closed to open music platforms will take, but I’m willing to bet that by 2020, the vast majority of the music we listen to will be released in an open format.

    Anyway, we don’t disagree about the fact that slowing down progress can be very bad. It’s certainly conceivable that a string of bad copyright decisions in the early 90s could have set the web back by a decade, and that would have been a pretty terrible outcome. But I think something like the Internet would have eventually knocked AOL off its throne, because there just isn’t any way to compete with the decentralized efforts of millions (to say nothing of tens or hundreds of millions) of people with the unrestricted ability to exchange information.

  2. I agree the prognosis for decentralized victory was and is good, but my small disagreement with

    there just isn’t any way to compete with the decentralized efforts of millions

    is that those efforts need an appropriate platform/growth medium. The internet did grow beyond being an obscure network dominated by computer nerds, but my conjecture is that there was a fair chance of it not growing beyond that niche — with a combination of the right legal obstacles and better decisions by AOL and similar (e.g., just a little openness on their closed platforms).

    Apple is probably doing better than AOL (substitute relatively flexible DRM for a little opnness), but I hope it has a short half-life , and not one determined by the FTC.

  3. I was reminded to revisit this post by Tim Lee’s comments on retarded Belgian newspapers which included

    If the courts were to uphold the former position, it would have a devastating impact on the search engine industry, because the logistics of getting opt-in permission from millions of individual site owners would likely be beyond the resources of all but the largest companies. If you want a stagnant search engine industry dominated by Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo, just set up copyright hurdles that will make it virtually impossible for new firms to enter the market.

    Yep. Thank goodness most jurisdictions have not been so stupid.

  4. […] Addendum 20061020: Ironically for me the company behind Songbird is called Pioneers of the Inevitable. […]

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