Mitch continues the discussion of TCPA.  He's pushing back pretty hard on my last comments, in which I opined that there is nothing wrong with being skeptical, but that some people are too paranoid -- to the point of being unproductive.  He seems to think I was saying that only journalists are permitted to be skeptical, and spends a lot of time defending the reasons why other people might be skeptical.  It's unnecessary effort, though, since I think skepticism is perfectly reasonable and healthy, even on the part of non-journalists.

But let's be honest -- most people are speculating about what Palladium is, since I doubt that most specifics are even close to being figured out within Microsoft (and Palladium is in any case a marketing catch-all, ala ".NET", "Hailstorm", "DNA", or "DNS").  And on top of these likely inaccurate speculations about what the specific Palladium feature set will be, people are calculating grand "what-if" scenarios and coming up with bad things that potentially might happen as a result of those inaccurately-guessed features.  Like I said in my previous two posts, people are essentially saying "We don't know what Microsoft is planning, and we don't know whether they can pull it off, and we don't know for sure if it is a conspiracy.  But at least we know that it is called Palladium, and it is probably bad for the fish."  And the thing that really puzzles me is that these people seem to have learned nothing from Hailstorm.  The overwhelming consensus from all of the pundits was that Hailstorm was a power grab by Microsoft to take over the entire Internet.  But for every person you talked to, inside or outside of Microsoft, there was a different opinion of what specifically Hailstorm was.  Then, after all of the gnashing of teeth over something that nobody could even define, news.com reported Jim Allchin as saying that he had no idea if or how "it" would ever be implemented.  The funny thing is, I still never figured out exactly what Hailstorm was.  All anyone ever knew was that it was called "Hailstorm", and it was bad for the fish.  I still wonder how all of the pundits knew that it was bad for the fish, since that would presumably mean that they knew what it was in the first place.  Maybe I should make my analogy a little more obvious: "We don't know if the king actually got new clothes or not, and we have no idea what they look like, but we know they are ugly."

But even assuming that we know what the heck Palladium is, Mitch says "So now Microsoft proposes a technology initiative that COULD extend Microsoft's monopoly by making it impossible for third-party software to run without approval from Microsoft. Any sensible person is going to be concerned."  But what exactly is stopping Microsoft from shutting out particular third-party software right now?  Why on earth would Microsoft need to invent some new thing called Palladium, when Microsoft already owns the operating system that everything else runs on?  There is nothing technically difficult about disabling third-party software.  Arbitrary third-party software runs on Windows because Microsoft permits, wants, and is legally obligated to allow it to run on Windows.  If those factors changed, lack of a technology called Palladium sure as heck wouldn't be the thing standing in the way.

Furthermore, if marketing thought that there was a demand for computers that were capable of running only "approved" software, they would just sell the Xbox to those consumers, rather than destroy the successful PC franchise.  Xbox is only capable of running software that is signed with a Microsoft-approved key.  For Xbox customers, that is just fine.  But the fact that Microsoft maintains an operating system for PC should be clear evidence that there is also a demand for a more flexible OS.  Microsoft makes its money from consumers, not from Hollywood campaign contributions.  And if anyone thinks that Microsoft would just walk away from that market, they are crazy.

Mitch also reiterates a point that I made in my first post on the topic, when he says "CD copy-protection technology proved to be a fiasco".  In his previous post, he referred to DRM as "Rube-Goldberg" technology that is likely to be ineffective.  I agree in part, but to me this is just further evidence that such technology couldn't ever be a very effective tool of global domination on the part of Microsoft.  Personally, I would take the argument further, and respond to Mitch's comment "Still, Microsoft is a multibillion-dollar corporation, and sensible people view multibillion dollar corporations the same way the Founding Fathers viewed federal government: as useful tools for progress, but very scary and not particularly trustworthy."  In fact, when it comes to these conspiracy theories, I think that government and BigCos are a good comparison.  If my years in Department of Defense taught me anything, it is that the government is completely incapable of most of the conspiracies people suggest.  The government can't even balance their books.  What large organizations gain in inertia, they lose in ability to be tactical.  Small organizations and individuals can focus single-mindedly on specific sequences of goals.  But larger organizations tend to be fraught with infighting and disagreement at every level, in an almost fractal manner.  Times of crisis can bring consistent focus to a government or BigCo, but this sort of "crisis focus" is way different from the sort of long-term plotting and planning that individual and small-company focus can bring.  In other words, it is a mistake to anthropomorphize BigCos too much.  BigCos and governments absolutely should be on perpetual probation.  But it's more because these 800lb Gorillas might accidentally trample your house (and then try to bury it to hide the damage) than it is because they might try to sneak inside and steal your silverware.  Gorillas aren't smart enough to steal your silverware, and they wouldn't really have the attention span to pull it off.

Finally, Mitch accuses me of slinging FUD at the so-called TCPA FAQ.  This is basically true, since I thought it was pretty crummy.  First of all, it's not a FAQ.  It is written by someone who was openly critical of the TCPA and labeled it as anti-competitive before deciding to write a "FAQ", and does not represent the answers of someone who is actually representing TCPA in good faith.  And since FAQ means "Frequently Asked Questions", you would assume it represents questions from the general population that are commonly asked.  Instead, this so-called TCPA FAQ seems to have questions that were rhetorically pitched by the author so that he could answer them.  An interesting exercise is to take the so-called "Questions" and cut-paste them in a row without the answers.  The questions alone are like topic headings to a propaganda piece, and certainly do not represent questions that real people are frequently asking this guy:

6. This all seems on balance fairly worthwhile.
10. OK, so TCPA stops kids ripping off music and will help companies keep data confidential. It may help the Mafia too, but apart from the pirates, the industrial spies and the FBI, who has a problem with it?
17. Who else will lose?
18. Ugh. What else?
20. But hang on, isn't TCPA illegal under antitrust law?

So I think that this is a paper with an obvious agenda, disguised as a FAQ and deceptively attempting at the start to appear unbiased and from an authoritative source.

On the other hand, I don't equate Anderson (the author of the so-called TCPA FAQ) with the "too paranoid" people I talked about above.  I can think of lots of good reasons besides excessive paranoia that he would write this.  But the so-called TCPA FAQ is gratuitously pessimistic, just like many pundits on Palladium.  I think I've outlined above some of the reasons why I think the pessimistic scenario is silly, and in my earliest post on the topic I tried to point out some things that the pessimists aren't telling you (like, privacy is just DRM for individuals, and DRM is just privacy for publishers).  Personally, I think that the technologies of TCPA are a critical step for us to enable true freedom of speech protections and democracy via the web (and I have felt this way since before the Intel chip-ID scheme got shot down the first time).  The Internet is the most powerful human connection mechanism ever devised, and is the best chance we've ever had of disintermediating societal governance.  But people need to be able to trust it, and without the entore stack working in concert, from the chip on up, there is no way to provide that.

1:23:53 PM    comment