January 2014 - Apple Outsider

My familiarity with Macintosh came relatively late in life. Our first computer was a Commodore PET, which my father, a math teacher, borrowed from his school. It was replaced by an IBM PC Jr, then a PS/2. My dad taught me some Turbo Pascal, and then that was it. We never got another computer. We were a DOS house, and I barely saw a GUI until 1995, when I left for college.

I had seen a few Macs, but most of them were very old. So when I got to college and saw my friend Seth’s PowerMac 7100/66, I was shocked. The screen is so big! It has color! It does things other than print layout! I was hooked. I bought a Mac within weeks. My dad thought I was nuts.

These were the days when built-in Ethernet was largely unheard of, and yet Macs had them. Most computers in the dorm didn’t even have a modem. The World Wide Web was just starting to become a phenomenon. The Yahoo! homepage was a grey, HTML 2.0 mess. There was no spam.

We didn’t just have Ethernet, though. We had AppleTalk. Every Mac user in every dorm was a click away, and not only could we share files, but through a System 7 Chooser extension called BroadCast, we could message each other in realtime. It was IM before IM.

Then, of course, there was Marathon, which also supported AppleTalk. We badged our BroadCast usernames with |M| so complete strangers would know who was up for a game.“M?”“Sure”“Join”

So here we were in 1995 playing spontaneous eight-man networked deathmatches. Every night. All night. People came to our doors asking us to turn the volume down — and to stop screaming at each other.

But for me, it was more than games and chats and word processors and desktop pictures and custom icons. I wanted to understand why Apple thought RISC processors were better than CISC. How those menus and windows got on the screen. How I could make my own. And so I started flunking classes because I was too busy coding for no discernible reason. At that point, my father, bless him, said “I think you need to make a decision.” I went into college an aspiring veterinarian. I came out an aspiring software developer. The rest is, well, now I’m where I am.

The Mac made me excited about technology again. It changed and shaped my life in just about every way.

A few years after I graduated, I found a position at Apple that matched the skills I had scraped up to that point. Mac OS X had just been released, and Apple was still losing money. One of the interviewers (who is still there today) asked me, “How do you feel about potentially working for an underdog?”

I told him I spent all my savings on a Performa 6300CD, and then again on a PowerMac 8600. I got the job.

Sitting there on the east coast in a dirty dorm room with so much to learn, reading Guy Kawasaki’s email newsletter, it seemed so ridiculous that I’d ever be an Apple Evangelist that I didn’t even bother dreaming about it. In retrospect, it seems obvious.

The U.S. Court of Appeals made a significant and troubling decision this week: it shut down a 2010 FCC decree that prevented internet service providers (“ISPs”) from selectively enhancing or restricting traffic to certain destinations (websites, streaming services, etc.) The collective term for this idea has become known as Net neutrality.

If you need help understanding what’s at stake, you must read Nilay Patel’s dissection on The Verge. While you’re at it, see Fred Wilson’s brief but brutal take on what it means for entrepreneurs and investors.

At the very least, you should take a good look at this mock-advertisement posted by ‘quink’ on Reddit. It’s the most compelling and succinct illustration I’ve seen. Even the fine print was written with care.

Put simply: the Internet we know and depend on will become something very different. The business relationship with your provider will change its focus from consumption (how many ones and zeros came over the wire) to behavior (what kind of ones and zeros). The latter is much more discriminatory and insidious.

Quink’s illustration is far from the worst-case scenario. Have a look at your cellular bill: most of us have minute allocations for specific times of the day and week. Now imagine a future where Netflix streaming is twice as expensive after 6PM. Where a single Skype call costs as much as a monthly landline.

The privacy implications are just as chilling. A discriminatory model bakes surveillance into the way ISPs do business. Sure, your provider can snoop on your traffic right now, but nothing in the fundamental concept of delivery requires or justifies that they do. With this environment in place, the implications for privacy and anonymity tools like Tor should be obvious: they would be banned in the provider’s terms of service (how else can they know how much to charge and what to block?) and lobbyists would waste no time making them illegal.

It’s sad that this has come to an issue of courts and regulatory bodies. The real problem is that there’s nowhere else to turn. There is no tangible consumer choice. The infrastructure is effectively monopolized. It will not be possible to vote on this with your wallets: you can submit, or cancel your service. But nobody’s going to stop using the Internet — certainly not in the kind of volume that would make a dent in policy.

The picture above resonates so well because we’ve seen it before. We see these itemized, booby-trapped menus every time we buy television or phone service. So it’s quite difficult to call this vision far-fetched when you consider the people who sell us Internet connectivity are the same people who sell us television and telephone connectivity. This is absolutely the future they want. And if nothing changes, they’re going to get it.

(Update: This article originally attributed the ISP “pricing menu” image to a user on Twitter. Iain Delaney pointed out the correct source. Sadly, none of these outcomes will change the way work is stolen on the Internet.)

Archives for January 2014