Taming the Consumer's Computer

March 11, 2002

By JONATHAN L. ZITTRAIN

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

Last month the top executives of two of the most powerful

media companies in the world traveled to Washington to

testify before Congress about the most dangerous threat

they face: the American consumer.

Of course they didn't quite phrase it that way. Michael

Eisner, chief executive of the Walt Disney Company,

complained that the technology industry made it too easy

for "people wanting to get anything for free on their

television or computer or hand-held device." Peter Chernin,

president of the News Corporation, worried that the

Internet's "ability to empower the general public" would

lead to the online theft of some of the contents of media

companies' digital treasuries.

Both men want the next generation of personal computers to

be unable to deliver unauthorized movies, music and other

content, and they asked that Congress stand ready to

intervene if industry failed to deliver the necessary

technology to safeguard its products. A lone executive,

from Intel, objected. The market, he said, not Congress,

should dictate how technology works.

The debate on Capitol Hill between content providers like

Disney and those who make the products to deliver that

content, like Intel, was really a proxy for a much larger

debate: What do we want our technology to do? How do we

want it to work? And do we have any say in the matter?

For most forms of current technology, these questions have

long been settled. No executives are worried about illegal

uses of televisions or coffee makers, for instance, and no

consumers need to worry that these appliances will crash or

become infected with viruses - and we would never accept it

if they did. Our TV's and VCR's don't take ill when we

watch infected programs, and our refrigerators never

require rebooting.

Yet we have come to tolerate such problems from our

personal computers. The PC's fundamental and unique

unreliability flows from its construction as a so-called

flexible platform - a mere staging area for many kinds of

software. The point (and bane) of a PC is, essentially, to

run whatever software it encounters.

There are plenty of reliable computers: the controls of the

modern Airbus 340 are fully given over to a computer, and

video-game consoles consistently work as advertised, as do

Aegis missile cruisers, cellular telephones and digital

watches. All contain transistors. Can technologists figure

out how to replicate the reliability of airplanes,

telephones, watches and televisions in future versions of

Windows and Linux, so that a mischievous 12-year-old half a

world away can't erase a thousand far-flung hard drives?

Absolutely. In January Bill Gates sent a memo to all

Microsoft employees declaring a new, overarching, even

revolutionary mandate: Software must be reliable and

"trustworthy." This new focus is both welcome and

worrisome, because the very steps needed to secure our

computers and networks can be the steps that will deaden

them to continued innovation and creative uses - while

opening them to more intrusive monitoring by mainstream

technology manufacturers and content providers.

Mr. Gates and the co-captains of his industry are producing

blueprints for so-called "trusted" PC's. They will employ

digital gatekeepers that act like the bouncers outside a

nightclub, ensuring that only software that looks or

behaves a certain way is allowed in. The result will be

more reliable computing - and more control over the machine

by the manufacturer or operating system maker, which

essentially gives the bouncer her guest list.

And as soon as there are limits on the software a PC can

run, there will be limits on what PC users can do. That's

exactly what executives like Mr. Eisner and Mr. Chernin

want. They'd like software and hardware companies to build

PC's to allow a publisher an exquisite level of control

over a book or a song or a movie in the hands of a

consumer. Trusted PC users might spend $1.95 for a single

viewing of the latest Disney animated feature, or they

might pay a similar amount for three listens of U2's most

recent single. Security, stability, reliability - and

control.

Users may buy a trusted PC even if it won't show a digital

video lent by a friend, because it will act less like a

temperamental computer and more like a crash-free super-VCR

- like the just-released Microsoft X-box. But in the

process of "improving" our PC's, the manufacturers and

their partners will be able to determine what software will

and won't be allowed to run, what we can and can't do with

the information to which we're exposed, and what data about

our online activities will be collected and sent to the

manufacturer or content provider to assist in future

marketing.

Apart from manufacturers' desire not to define the uses of

a PC too narrowly, the public interest in flexible computer

platforms and open data exchange remains almost entirely

absent from this debate. Disney and its cohort are free to

view PC's as delivery systems for Mickey Mouse and friends

- and to make their content available through broadband.

But it's an entirely different matter to re-engineer the PC

so it becomes simply another appliance.

The PC platform and the Internet to which it connects is

the engine of the information revolution - as important to

our economy and culture as all the movies in Hollywood. A

shift from open platforms to closed appliances may be

inevitable, as our consumerist desire for trustworthy PC's

dovetails with information providers' obsession with

control. But we should beware the haste with which some

would sacrifice flexibility for control. If we can't at

least temper this taming of the chaotic PC, the victims

will be competition, innovation and consumer freedom.

Jonathan L. Zittrain is an assistant professor at Harvard

Law School and a director of its Berkman Center for

Internet & Society.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/11/opinion/11ZITT.html?ex=1017028310&ei=1&en=9042dc7204d93884