Barbarians in the Library

Is it worth fighting to keep information free?

Imagine yourself trapped in the jungle by a fierce tribe of natives. Imprisoned in your cell, you hear another captive on the other side of a thin wall. "Hello," you whisper, "how long have you been here?" He responds with what sounds to you a long stream of gibberish. "What's going to happen to us? Can we escape?" No answer -- at least, none you can understand.

Perhaps if you could see each other, you could transfer information via some crude signs or charades. However, you can't. You're stuck. Wouldn't communication be nice?

the Prisoner's Dilemma

The Prisoner's Dilemma postulates two prisoners being interrogated separately. Each step of interrogation is called a round. In every round, each prisoner must make a simple decision. "Do I stick to the truth, that we have done nothing wrong, or do I lie, implicate my friend, and, hopefully, walk free?"

Points are scored as follows. If both defect, they each receive zero points. If one defects and the other does not, they receive ten points and lose ten points, respectively. If both cooperate, they each receive five points.

Winning the game is slightly different from a normal game (not just because it's a rather grisly game). It's not a zero-sum game, in that player A is against player B -- in fact, they're in cooperation. The object is to get the most points altogether.

You might think that the obvious solution is for both to cooperate every time. However, as game analysts and stock brokers will tell you, that's not how the business world works. If you're not acting purely out of rational interest ("Hey, I get ten points if I sell out and five if I cooperate. Hang 'em high, boys!"), you're in danger of a shareholder lawsuit. (Unless, of course, you can somehow work schoolkids and fuzzy kittens and puppies into your press release explaining why you're not cutthroat enough in increasing shareholder value. Good luck.)

A World with Fences

With a dominant position in the market, and given some strange laws which seem (to some) to insist that corporations do whatever it takes to increase stockholder value, is it surprising that some companies take the free information which has enabled them to achieve so much, only to make it unfree?

If one were feeling particularly arrogant or witty, he might liken this to the behavior of a common drug dealer. The first few hits are free, but once you're hooked, you'll pay quite a bit for the privilege of maintaining your state. (I have heard apocryphal reports that Nestle did something similar in Third World countries, distributing formula to new mothers, for free, just until they stopped lactating.)

Granted, there are some good reasons (besides tax reasons!) for large companies to give away software and hardware to deserving institutions such as schools and universities, but watch the details closely. If you received a sweepstakes letter in the mail which said, "You're a winner! Just pay $300 to collect your prize!", would your scam-o-meter go off? If so, why should a University accept a 'donation' of $100,000 worth of software from a certain large software company if and only if the University is willing to get rid of all software from a competing company?

That's not "promoting education", that's "hooking 'em while they're young".

Viral Slavery

Consider the strange case of a company A which has five suppliers and ten customers. Each of the companies wishes to do business. In fact, company A is a major customer of each supplier, and a major provider for each customer. (There has to be a better way to phrase this.)

Each company speaks the de facto language of business with regard to its software. A purchaser from company A can send a document to his supplier and both can read and make changes.

Everything is peachy, until the fateful day when company A upgrades its software package to the latest version. Lo and Behold, they had the misfortunate of purchasing software from a software company that wants to dominate the market! As a consequence, their documents are no longer readable by the suppliers or the customers!

As is also the case, the suppliers are at a tremendous disadvantage. They have two options -- ask company A to use a different, but mutually acceptable document format, or bite the bullet and move to the same version of the software themselves.

Given the history of computing and information, the first option is certainly possible. However, the kinds of software companies that engage in this sort of dirty behavior have quite an interest in making sure that their customers never reach the kind of technical saavy that might be able to figure out how to get around this sort of issue. Plus, while the option for compatibility is there, it's not the default behavior of the software. Insert nefarious reason here.

So the option most taken is the second -- company A's upgrade has spread, virus-like, to the other companies with which it exchanges information. The real winner here is the software company, preying on the enforced ignorance of its customers to win markets not by technical excellence, but by the sheer force of peer pressure.

So Long, Suckers

That would be true, and fatally so, if not for one thing. The Internet.

As long as the public (perhaps better written as "civilians") have been using what grew into the Internet, it's been dedicated to the free flow of information. The original design for the World Wide Web had more to do with sharing research between scientists all over the world than with delivering prodigious amounts of misinformation, pornography, and banner ads. (More's the pity.)

Mystic arcana and technomancy aside, think of a giant library. It consists of hundreds of thousands of rooms full of books and papers and binders. The funny thing about this library, though, is that anyone can build a room and fill it with stuff. Through the magic of the library (think Terry Pratchett's Discworld here), as soon as someone builds a room -- be it a closet or a Taj Mahal -- and performs a set of incantations, it's part of the library proper. Anyone just wandering through can browse through the collection of old family photos, bad poetry, and bizarre technopolitical manifestos such as this, in the rooms of the library.

That seems more fitting than the Wild West analogy I sometimes hear, and not just because I like the idea of doddering old Wizards banging around in the corners dislodging stacks of books, getting jam all over the doorknobs, and occasionally saving the day. (That's the Unix way.)

Please understand that there are good reasons why you might pay a bit of money for your library card. It takes a bit of work to keep the magic portals flowing, though you can find places that give out cards for free. That's really a peripheral issue to the more important philosophical information.

Now imagine that one of those hypothetical devious-and-somewhat-incompetent software companies discovered this library. As the sign above each entrance reads, "Information wants to be free," the keepers of the rooms allow them to enter and browse. Things are okay, for a while. Suddenly, there's a horde of black-armbanded patrons entering the library. Well, that's fine too -- information wants to be free.

Things go fine for another while, until the company decides to be devious through incompetence. It decides to build its own rooms. Rather than adhering to the acceptable incantations for adding a new wing to the library, it innovates slightly different spells. Perhaps anyone without a black armband can still enter those new rooms, but some of the books are blurry. Perhaps you'll turn into a small frog. Lots of little things could suddenly go wrong -- but they'll all be more annoying than dangerous. After all, very few people get the incantations right the first time -- there's a legend about a pioneer who summoned a bunch of dragon worms way back in '86, and shut down the library for fumigation.

More time goes on, and the strangeness in the company's wing keeps increasing. Soon, no one without the black armbands is allowed in there. Even worse, the weirdness spreads. Evidently their incantations aren't satisfied with occasional frogification within the wing, but randomly infect other rooms in the library with the same behavior!

Even worse, the only information everyone else can get to is written in code! It's totally incomprehensible to anyone without an armband. Of course, the people with the armbands, while not totally protected from the evil frog rays and occasional blurry pages, can read everything else clearly.

Why not succumb, and get an armband yourself? Well, two reasons come to mind. First, you may have been a library patron before the software company built its wing. You're aware that there are standards and guidelines set to insure that information (which wants to be free) will be free to anyone, whether or not they have the black armband.

Second, their information really isn't free. That's free as in the libre sense. (For the non-French speakers out there, notice how similar that word is to liberty.) If I want to look up some information about the software company for a friend who is a customer of said company, or for research for an overlong, inflammatory essay, should I have to purchase a black armband *and* publish my findings in a format incomprehensible to anyone without the armband?

The answer is, no.

Moral Reaction

Given the possibility (with irony waiting somewhere around here), that one incompetent-yet-evil company may decide to partake of the obvious benefits of the library (freedom to access information, freedom to use information, freedom to make money by providing services based on that information) while attempting to remove the freedom of others to do the same, is there justification to act against that company?

That's really the meat of this essay.

As I see it, there are at least three possible positions: the free market approach, the boycott, and the blackout.

The free market approach says, "Let the free market decide the fate of this company." I suppose our values as consumers (in the sense of what we value, not how important we are to vendors) have some effect on how we spend our dollars. Eventually, if enough people are fed up with the arrogance of a large company, they might not spend money on its products anymore. Perhaps a smaller, more nimble and innovative company will come along and take over the market or make the large company's flagship product obsolete. C'est la vie. Turn, turn turn. The good thing about dictators is that they all die, eventually.

The bad thing about this approach, as I see it, is that it assumes the market has a conscience. It doesn't. Remember how complicated the Prisoner's Dilemma is with only two players? Add another, and another, and another. When you get to a million players, you're talking about a market for a successful product. You're also talking about an unknowable level of complexity for gauging the interactions between people.

You're also not dealing with the real world if you perform a mapping of one product/one company. Think of some of the software companies in existence today. Can you really say, "I like the office suite division, but not the Internet Applications division, so I'll specify on my $599 check that all moneys are to go to the former"?

What's worse, is that there is a peculiar brand of legal folklore that says that corporations are people too. Hey, if we're going to mix legal niceties into our economic woes (well, I only *call* it the free market view) we might as well consider that corporations are consumers. Big, voracious consumers. You find the 5000 people in your neighborhood who feel the same way about our fictional company and resolve not to spend $199 apiece for the personal version of the software in question, and I'll find a big company of 10000 people willing to spend $299 apiece (down from MSRP of $499!) for the commercial version. If you think corporations have ethics, reread the rule about maximizing stockholder value.

Finally, we have to realize that we are the market. If the market is the arbiter of what is right and good (at least in an economic scope), then the current situation at any one time must be pretty good, right? That is, the basis by which we judge the rightness of a company's actions is, at least in great part, the success of that company in the market.

You may disagree, but I don't think that's the best way to look at things.

The boycott approach takes some of the ideas of the free market approach and tries to focus their application. The basic idea is that a company will appreciate economic pressure directed because of ethical concerns. For example, if big-bad-incompetent-reseller decides that its peculiar business process (electronic shopping baskets that ring up purchases while you shop) is super-tip-top-secret enough that it is willing to sue any other business suspected of implementing a similar idea, you might get your friends together and tell the first company that you will not be shopping there anymore because of the bully tactics.

(We can only hope that no company officer reads that last paragraph and thinks, "Hey, that's a great idea! Let's patent a business process!" All you MBAs out there, focus on my shopping basket idea. My e-mail address is below, so contact me when you want to cut me a check.)

One plus of this approach is that it is (or rather, can be) limited in scope to the particular offense. That is, if a particular motion picture studio puts out DVDs made entirely from clubbed-baby-seal-fur, consumers who oppose clubbing those cute baby seals might decide not to purchase those DVDs until the company discovers plastic. (The current state of motion picture studios is more likely to club Norwegian teenagers, but baby seals tend to be cuter, on the whole.)

You'll notice that I haven't said much about how this relates to the library metaphor. Unfortunately, it doesn't help much. Suppose that a big nasty incompetent company decides that it wants to help people write notes back and forth to other library users. No problem there -- this being a library, I'm sure there is an established standard on how to do that. (We might call it RFC 822, if we were feeling pedantic.)

However, this company being both greedy and incompetent, it might decide that the normal pen and paper way is boring. So it would come out with a special magic paintbrush for its users. Things are okay for a while, until the company introduces its special magic paint. Supposedly, the paint, when applied to the normal paper via the paintbrush gives all sorts of colors and pretty pictures (if you know what you're doing -- but if you knew what you were doing, you probably wouldn't be using a paintbrush and an easel simply for writing a note to your friend). The unfortunate thing is that no one without the company's special goggles can read the notes -- plus, the special paint has a nasty habit of catching on fire, clubbing baby seals, and unlocking your front door when criminals are walking by.

To make things worse, not only are there more and more of the self-styled painters trying to write notes all the time, the normal pieces of paper are too small. Have you ever tried to paint a quick note to your friend, "Hey, sorry I missed you -- let's meet up for pancakes later!" on an index card? No, you need a canvas for that. So these "notes" take up more space on the bulletin boards, and pretty soon, they're all you can see.

So the more people that enter the library -- even if they don't come in with help from the big incompetent company -- will start to think that that's the way business is done.

It's also kinda like the barbarians invading Rome. Sure, the Romans were grumpy and cruel and they did some weird, weird things involving chickens and aqueducts, but at least they didn't wipe their noses on the tablecloth and go out sacking every Friday night. The Romans took off -- and it became, "When in Rome, do as the Visigoths do." At least the screaming hordes of new library patrons aren't setting small fires in the corners, unless you count the stacks of exploding paintings.

Okay, in our analogy-in-an-analogy, the technical users, the kinds of people who set up the standards and have actually heard of or consulted RFC 822 (yes, that's the library's rules for leaving notes for other patrons) take off for parts uknown to newcomers, leaving the Louvre dotted with candy wrappers and spray painted phrases like "HI ARE YOU CUTE!!!" and "for a good time call b1ff!!!!" Oh well -- it was a nice library once, and if the big incompetent company can make money selling stinky furs to barbarians, so much the better.

We lose out in that scenario in a couple of ways. First, who is to say that, with a couple of charm school lessons, we couldn't get those would-be barbarians from hitting each other with chairs? We might even get them to write better manifestoes than this.

Second, why should we let the library go to pieces because it's easier to hide in the nooks and crannies than to say, "SHHHH" or "Use a pen" now and then? Okay, that may not work if you're going up against millions of patrons brought in by a big incompetent company with a vested interest in replacing pens and papers with giant billboards and exploding invisible paint.

I guess it's easier than the last alternative, though.

The blackout option is pretty scary. I've been alluding to it throughout, and it's really the point of the whole essay, but I really don't want to say that I advocate it -- it's just something that we ought to think about before someone goes and does it. If you're the type of person to read scary long-winded manifestoes and jump into the fray without thinking about the pros and cons raised, please go look at some website where you can punch a monkey for $20 or something like that.

The rest of you, read on.

When we talk about freedom to access information, we mean that we've agreed on ways to transfer that information back and forth. We're not prisoners bound in separate cells with no common language between us. We may not make guarantees that you'll find this information useful -- but we'll guarantee that if you're willing to make the attempt to get at it in the same way everyone else does, you're probably going to get it.

Now the armbands and the goggles and the invisible flammable paint go against the spirit of the library. Yes, I keep saying the hypothetical company is big and incompetent -- so some of these could just be honest mistakes. But we've also talked about how a company could get away with saying that while sharpening its knives over the library like a Christmas ham.

We have to be prepared for the possibility that, someday, there will arise a company which sees the free access to information and decides that there's gold in those hills. If people are used to accessing the information, perhaps they'll pay good money to keep doing so -- if only the company could find some way to funnel everyone through its entrance!

The place to do that, of course, is in the standards of information exchange. The true secret of the library is not that there is an infinite amount of existing knowledge already available, it is that people -- you and I -- can add to the content out there, to correct it, to publish new information, to create things never before created. If we follow the standards, everyone will have access to this information. If we use the invisible exploding paint, we're limited to the people who buy armbands and goggles.

When it's explained to people that way, they understand. But the company doesn't care -- it smells money.

Another secret is that the potential benefit anyone can get from the library, whether it's me as a researcher or the big incompetent company as a vendor, is greater than anything he or she or it can contribute. (This secret falls down sometimes when you think about people like the IETF or the W3 consortium, but hear me out.) The library was a valuable place before I started using it. It would be a valuable place even if the big incompetent company suddenly winked out of existence. Maybe more valuable then.

Therein lies our weapon -- the blackout.

What I'm Not (Really) Advocating

Well... what if the Wizards got fed up with the big incompetent company that let the Barbarians into the library and (this is the important point) never gave them a chance to become civilized because it wouldn't capture the library and make lots and lots of money off of it? What if the Wizards got together and said, "You're getting a whole lot but giving nothing back. That's really missing the point, you greedy company!" (Not their exact words.)

The Wizards might consider the Blackout. That's where they cut off access to their sections of the library from the big incompetent company. No big deal, right? But think about it for a second.

The only way from one room in the library to another is through a handful of other rooms -- that's the way the system works. Yes, it's a little chaotic and more than a little complicated, but it was designed that way for a reason. Not architecturally beautiful, the library gets people from one room to another in any way it can.

That all depends on the willingness of the people who own and maintain the magic incantations to get people from one room to another.

The Wizards decide that the Barbarians knocking on the doors, painting over the windows, setting fire to the curtains, and harassing the owls and badgers in the corners so that the big incompetent company can take over the library and make everyone else pay for the information they already had access to are too much. The magic dies down. The Barbarians are thwarted and have to spend their lives milling around in the big incompetent company's waiting room. Sure, it has plush chairs and lots of grass huts to burn, but it's not the Library, by any stretch of the imagination. Eventually, the Barbarians will get bored and harass the big incompetent company instead.

Problem solved from there, right? The big incompetent company chases down a few of the Wizards and tries to impress them with some claptrap about "innovation" and "freedom" and "consumer choice" (while trying not to notice that the invisible paint is exploding on their notecanvases). The Wizards sit there and blink for a while, until the company spokeslizard finally loses his cool and asks, "Well, what are you going to do about it?"

One of the Wizards smiles a dangerous smile and says, "I thought you liked living in a world with everything fenced off." Then the Wizards hitch up their robes, say a few magic words, and disappear into the library.

Now this is a dangerous idea -- I certainly don't advocate it at all as anything more than an interesting idea. But there's precedent for it. (But summoning a million elephants and trying to squeeze them through all of the doors to the big and incompetent company is definitely not the answer. It's not aimed at achieving the goal of free information -- it's just going to spread a lot of mess around.)

Consider the UDP. You have a couple of Wizards who run a small restaurant. People come in, place their orders, get their food, and enjoy their meals. Suddenly, the big incompetent company discovers the restaurant, and some of the Barbarians discover they can supposedly make a lot of money if they sit in the restaurant and shout out advertising slogans at the diners. Other Barbarians think it's just funny to do stupid stuff like that.

One morning, a nice young couple enters the restaurant and tries to order. Unfortunately, there's a nice large group of Vikings in the corner singing loudly, repeating what the waiter says, getting louder and more annoying each time. How long will the Wizards put up with this?

The UDP is the end of the line for the big incompetent company. If it's unwilling to deal with the Barbarians it's letting in to the diner for long enough (whether by reforming them into good little Romans or by keeping them away from the diner), the Wizards deny access to the restaurant (and the entire food court) from that company. Now innocent diners are affected, in theory, but they pay the company for the privilege of getting to places like the food court, and they need to take it up with the company. (Especially as they realize that many of the Barbarians aren't even customers of the company!)

That's a surprisingly effective policy -- the library and the food court are little more than a set of privately owned rooms linked together by deep magic. The owners have the right to say who can and cannot hop through their rooms en route to other places.

Maybe that's what needs to happen if there's ever a big incompetent company which wants to take over the library and take away the freedom of everyone to browse around, looking for a book or a pamphlet or to leave a quick note for a friend. If you're more interested in how you can lock things up to make money than how you can contribute to the library, you don't belong in it. Don't be surprised if the Wizards cut you out of their deep magic.

Why I'm Not Advocating This

The Blackout, if it should ever come to pass, should only be used in extreme cases, where the future of the library is at stake. I can only think of a few instances where it might have been appropriate to being to consider thinking of suggesting a Blackout against a particular company.

The future probably holds a few very important crossroads, though. If you've read my essay on going Beyond the Desktop, you'll remember that I think that the widespread deployment of XML and XML-aware applications can help us communicate and collaborate in ways we can't even imagine yet. Unfortunately, established big and incompetent companies have a strange way of embracing infant technologies, adding all sorts of robotic arms and laser death rays, and letting the resulting cyborged children die in a messy, whirring pile of bones and wires. Then the companies bring out their replacements and get everyone hooked for free. That's how some of these companies make money. (If you didn't already realize that, you haven't been reading very carefully.)

Yes, it's a dangerous idea -- but sometimes we have to choose between two unpleasant alternatives. Are the Wizards willing to give up access to a company's free information to prevent more information to become unfree? Are the Wizards willing to cut off access from the company to the world's free information, hoping that, if the promise of shared information doesn't work, the threat of losing real -- not just potential -- money will turn things around?

I don't know, Wizard. But I'm thinking about it.

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copyright 15 February 2000, chromatic

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