Sunrise

I got up early today and decided to bike down to the beach to watch the sunrise before work. It’s really convenient that our office is actually at the beach, because I get to do this more than just about anyone else I know. Except, I guess, the people I work with…

I’m going to sound like a crazy hippie here for a minute, but every time I watch the sun lift up over the ocean, when the sound of that warm salty breeze mixes with the subtly crashing waves, I feel like the world becomes a mirror possessed of the ability to simplify and refactor and strip to the essence any problems or worries incident upon it. It presents an austere but elegant reflection to an observer that accentuates that what is important and discards that what is trivial.

I told you I’d sound like a hippie.

So this morning, I went to the beach looking to clear my mind of some heavy thoughts related to work. The whole reason I was up at 5AM in the first place was because of said heavy thoughts, so it’s a good thing for me that the sun rises in the morning when I needed it!

Redux: The whole point of mVisible and MyxerTones is to radically simplify mobile content and services. Over the past two years that we’ve been operating, we’ve basically lumped the factors contributing to the complexity of developing mobile content and services into two camps: technical challenges and bureaucratic hurdles. What I’ve come to understand is that the technical challenges, while real, are really just engineering exercises. Not to belittle the scope of the technical challenge, but the fact is, you can (and we have) put together a competent team of engineers and build a platform that is technically capable of delivering content to just about any device on the planet.

And while we’ve framed the other class of problems as bureaucratic in the past, I think I have to now reclassify them as institutional. It’s not, as I’ve believed in the past, simply a matter of going through all of the required mating dances with the mobile carriers and the sea of companies in the so-called “value chain” beneath them. Yes, you certainly have to do the dance. But No, that doesn’t solve all the problems of complexity.

It turns out that the mobile industry as a whole has a tremendous amount of inertia behind the notion that delivering mobile content and services should remain complicated.

Carriers like Verizon force device manufacturers to cripple the phones they distribute to prevent consumers from using their full capabilities. They intentionally break existing applications with firmware “upgrades” not requested by subscribers. They take 50% of the revenue from any purchase made through their premium SMS channels – and at the same time contractually forbid partners from using any other competitive payment processors. Even if you don’t call it larceny, it’s an ugly oligarchy to be sure.

Speaking of ugly oligarchies. The recording industry, for its part, has apparently determined that its best chance of self-preservation is in assembling an assortment of extortionists, fear-mongers, and racketeers to harass and intimidate the very same people to which they market their limited catalogs of plastic pop stars and on whose computers they install spyware rootkits.

It must be a really weird thing to work in an industry that has harbors such blatant disgust for its own customers.

So what’s happened is that we, as MyxerTones, went into this whole “simplify mobile” endeavour bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, taking as common sense the notion that the easier you make it for anyone to offer their own content and services for mobile phones, the more value there will be in the entire ecosystem. Rising tide lifts all boats, that sort of thing. Anyone who has taken even a casual interest in understanding the history of the internet knows that every billion-dollar internet company (as well as the aggregate trillions in small companies doing business on the internet) is directly and unequivocally indebted to the uncompromising openness built into the network.

To think that mobile phones are anything but an extension of the internet is to embrace a legacy mindset. So to think that what’s best for the mobile industry is anything different than what’s been proven to be best for the internet in general is either arrogance or ignorance, neither of which is likely to bring longevity.

And what’s happened is that we’ve gotten caught up in the machine a little too much. We’ve started making product decisions based on who might sue us as opposed to what would bring the best value to our customers and to society as a whole. That’s what the sunrise made clear to me, and that’s why I’m so glad I watched it this morning, because I’m now 100% refocused on what it is we have to do.

There was a recent incident involving Digg a couple of weeks ago that you may have heard off. Turns out some super-secret magic decoding ring for DVD copy protection was figured out by some hacker somewhere. (Probably the Ukraine. They’ve got a lot of crazy number-smart people out there. ) So people started posting the magic decoder ring to Digg. Digg apparently gets served with a cease-and-desist or some such thing, and yanks references to the key. The users basically revolt, until Digg’s founder, Kevin Rose, eventually overrules their own lawyers and says screw it, we are a service, we are by and for the people, and we will not get in the way of what the people want to do.

Gutsy move. I mean, wow. It’s still not clear what the ramifications are for that. When Kevin refers to “a bigger company” in his post, he’s potentially guilty of a felony understatement.

This is my point: I, like Kevin Rose, believe that the pendulum has swung waaaaay too far toward the special interests and entrenched oligarchists, and away from The People. The entire reason I am involved with computers in the first place is because I was inspired by the early hackers who saw the great potential for individual empowerment through information. (Oh, and video games. I really loved video games.) So I’m going to make sure that when we’re building features into MyxerTones, we’re always thinking about enabling, and we’re going to stop spending so much of our time worrying about this guy or that guy suing us or whatever.

Mobile phones are the first exposure to the internet for most of the world’s population, and it would be a lost opportunity of unparalleled scale if the openness of the internet didn’t follow to the new devices. Like, lost opportunity akin to losing the recipe for penicillin on the way home from the lab.

Lighten up, Myk. It’s just bloody ringtones.

No. No, it isn’t. The whole bloody reason people think mobile content and services is just Madonna ringtones and the Pope’s “Thought of the Day” is because the platform has been locked up so tightly, with so few people able to address it. It’s only when the barriers to entry are removed that we will start to see the truly innovative applications arrive.

I don’t pretend that there aren’t issues to be confronted by opening the mobile internet airwaves to anyone to share and sell anything they want, but I believe the issues need to be be framed in a larger frame of discourse than the narrow-minded worlds of the mobile industry or the music industry. Our society still has a very long way to go before it has a mature understanding of how best to balance individual rights with those of rights holders, and the way things are right now it’s clear to me that society would be much better served if companies like MyxerTones was less timid and more focused on enabling rather than restricting.