WAP's Closed Door Approach

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This also appeared in Business 2.0 in May:

   http://www.business2.com/content/magazine/breakthrough/2000/05/01/10771

http://www.shirky.com/writings/wap_closed_door.html

> shirky.com: Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet
> Economics and Culture, Media and Community, Open Source
>
> WAP's Closed Door Approach
>
> Thanks to the wireless application protocol (WAP), the telephone and
> the PC are going to collide this year, and it's not going to be
> pretty. The problem with "wireless everywhere" is that the PC and the
> phone can't fuse into the tidy little converged info-appliance that
> pundits have been predicting for years, because while it's easy to
> combine the hardware of the phone and the PC, it's impossible to
> combine their philosophies.
>
> The phone-based assumptions about innovation, freedom, and commercial
> control are so different from those of the PC that the upcoming battle
> between the two devices will be nothing less than a battle over the
> relationship of the Internet to its users.
>
> The philosophy behind the PC is simple: Put as much control in the
> hands of the user as you possibly can. PC users can install any
> software they like; they can connect their PCs to any network; they
> can connect any peripherals; they can even replace the operating
> system. And they don't need anyone's permission to do any of these
> things. The phone has an equally simple underlying philosophy: Take as
> much control from the user as possible while still producing a useable
> device. Phones allow so little user control that users don't even
> think of their phones as having operating systems, much less software
> they can upgrade or replace themselves. The phone, in other words, is
> built around principles of restriction and corporate control of the
> user interface that are anathema to the Internet as it has developed
> so far.
>
> WAP extends this idea of control into the network itself, by
> purporting to offer Internet access while redesigning almost every
> protocol needed to move data across the wireless part of the
> network. WAP does not offer direct access to the Internet, but instead
> links the phone to a WAP gateway which brokers connections between the
> phone and the rest of the Net. The data that passes between the phone
> and this WAP gateway is translated from standard Internet protocols to
> a kind of parallel "W*" universe, where HTML becomes WML, TCP becomes
> WTP, and so on. The implication is that the W* world is simply
> wireless Internet, but in fact the WAP Forum has not only renamed but
> redesigned these protocols. WML, for example, is not in fact a markup
> language but a programming language, and therefore much more difficult
> for the average content creator to use. Likewise, WAP designers choose
> to ignore the lesson of HTML, which is so adaptable precisely because
> it was never designed for any particular interface.
>
> Familiar principles
>
> The rationale behind these redesigns is that WAP allows for error
> checking and for interconnecting different kinds of networks. If that
> sounds familiar, it's because these were the founding principles of
> the Internet itself, principles that have proven astonishingly
> flexible over 30 or so years and are perfectly applicable to wireless
> networks. The redesign of the protocol lets the WAP consortium blend
> the functions of delivery and display so the browser choice is locked
> in by the phone manufacturer. (Imagine how much Microsoft would like
> to have pulled off that trick.) No matter what the technical arguments
> for WAP are, its effect is to put the phone companies firmly in
> control of the user. The WAP consortium is determined that no third
> party will be able to reach the user of a wireless device without
> going through an interface that one of its member companies controls
> and derives revenue from.
>
> The effects of this control can be seen in a recent string of
> commercial announcements. Geoworks intends to enforce its WAP patents
> to extract a $20,000 fee from any large company using a WAP gateway
> (contrast the free Apache Web server). Sprint has made licensing deals
> with companies such as E-Compare to distribute content over its
> WAP-enabled phones (imagine having to negotiate a separate deal with
> every ISP to distribute content to PC users). Nokia announced it will
> use WAP to deliver ads to its users' phones (imagine WorldNet
> hijacking its subscribers' browsers to serve them ads.) By linking
> hardware, browser, and data transport together far more tightly than
> they are on the PC-based Internet, the members of the WAP Forum hope
> to create artificial scarcity for content, and avoid having to offer
> individual users unfettered access to the Internet.
>
> In the short run this might work because WAP has a head start over
> other protocols for wireless data. In the long run, though, it is
> doomed to fail because the only thing we've ever seen with the growth
> characteristics of the Internet is the Internet itself. The people
> touting WAP over the current PC-based methods of accessing the
> Internet want to focus on phone hardware versus PC hardware -
> small and cheap versus big and expensive. Don't be distracted
> by the form factor, though, because the philosophy of the
> PC-allow innovation from any quarter, with a minimum of
> roadblocks or expense - is the right answer for the growth of
> wireless over the long haul.  The real question is whether
> subsequent generations of WAP can evolve into a system with
> more user control and better integration with the real Internet
> before the PC world figures out how to offer a wireless device
> that embraces the advantages of wireless while not stifling the
> user's freedom.  If the Internet revolution has taught us
> anything, it's that whoever puts the most power in the hands of
> the user ultimately wins.

--
Gerald Oskoboiny <[email protected]>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/

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