Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy by Elder-Vass Dave

Author:Elder-Vass, Dave [Elder-Vass, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2016-06-24T04:00:00+00:00

Constructing monopoly using technology

Apple’s most significant contribution to Gillespie’s square of regulation, though, is arguably to the fourth, technological, side. MP3 tracks from filesharing sites can be copied easily from device to device without restrictions, but downloads from iTunes were restricted by Apple to the user’s own devices. When you buy a track from iTunes, you only buy the right to play it on a restricted set of devices, and Apple’s objective is to prevent you from playing it anywhere else. Copyright isn’t just enforced by the law and by persuasion, but by the use of technology to create what Mark Stefik calls ‘trusted systems’ (Lessig, 2006 , pp. 176–9). Systems, that is, that can be trusted by corporations to limit what we can do with what we buy from them. Having charmed its customers, Apple then entraps them: ‘they, too, must abide by strict rules in exchange for interacting with Apple’ (Lashinsky, 2012 , p. 149).

But this is only the beginning of Apple’s ambition to control the ecosystem built around their products. Unlike PC’s and Android smartphones, which anyone with the relevant skills can write software for and tailor to their personal preferences, the software environment on Apple’s products is strictly controlled by Apple itself. You may only download apps to an i Phone, for example, that Apple has approved for sale through their App Store, and they exclude apps for a variety of reasons (Gray, 2013 ). Steve Jobs banned Adobe’s widely used Flash software, for example, along with a number of other programming environments by changing ‘the terms and conditions of the licence that software developers must sign when writing code to run on Apple products’ (‘Apple boss explains ban on Flash’, 2010 ). It has been speculated that one reason was that these tools might allow users to download other software without going through Apple’s App Store, which like the iTunes store, skims off 30% of the user’s payments for Apple: ‘Allowing Flash – which is a development platform of its own – would just be too dangerous for Apple, a company that enjoys exerting total dominance over its hardware and the software that runs on it’ (Chen, 2008 ).

Indeed at first Jobs would not allow third-party apps to run on the iPhone at all, and only agreed once he had established that ‘they would have to meet strict standards, be tested and approved by Apple, and be sold only through the iTunes store’ (Isaacson, 2011 , p. 501). Apple’s logic is the logic of what Jonathan Zittrain has called appliancisation (2008 ). Zittrain argues that technology can be delivered in two forms. Generative technology is open to modification and enhancement by its users, which allows the development of whole industries to extend its capability and take it into new areas. The Internet itself is just such a technology. By contrast, appliances are locked-down, with strictly limited functions and strictly limited opportunities for configuration by their users. Many technologies take the form of appliances – fridges,

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