Most histories of the Internet stress the alignment between an open architectural form and the ‘open’ or democratic values of some of the earliest Internet pioneers. This continues today as we celebrate connections between Internet technology, freedom and democracy. The reality, however, is that the architecture and experience of the Internet are changing. There are many ways in which these changes happen: technical standards change; nations become more interested in regulating or controlling the flows of Internet traffic; and legal standards shift the possibility of interconnection between networks is governed. One particular change that often doesn’t receive much attention is the shift from the ‘wired’ Internet to the ‘mobile’ Internet, which occurs materially through our increased use of mobile devices, as well as through a shared imaginary that increasingly frames the Internet as being accessible anywhere and everywhere via mobile devices. This means that the way we think about our Internet experience—as seamless, everywhere and always on—relies upon the way that our Internet experience is being built, which is quite different in the ‘mobile’ space than it was in the ‘wired’ one. This shift has implications for user experience and practice, but it also has political-economic implications that are linked with the different history and technical architectures that are historically part of the mobile, rather than Internet, industry. The shift also calls into question the extent to which the openness that we tend to associate with the Internet results from a very particular historical confluence of factors.
This chapter explores how this shift allows us to analyze the way that openness—as architecture and practice—has been imagined in the past, and examine the factors that might enable or constrain it in future. As such, it explores the amazing persistence of imaginaries of openness even as they overlap and conflict with materialities of enclosure. These overlaps and conflicts provide a context for some recent history of the Internet, as well as chilling premonitions of its future. As the material platforms and architecture that support the Internet experience move to mobile devices, various types of enclosure can occur that are not only technical but which depend upon social norms and practices. These include the way that mobiles employ proprietary protocols and standards for interconnection, as well as the differences between the ‘open-source ecology’ of peer production of Internet software and the ‘app ecology’ of mobile application development. Their interrelationship suggests that we may need to change our expectations of openness or participation in building the Internet.
This chapter reviews the origins of the ‘open’ Internet, placing particular attention on the way that particular values were imagined through the design of Internet networks. These articulations between design and politics set expectations about the importance of features such as ‘openness.’ Openness is associated with increased opportunities for participation in altering the Internet itself. This participation is part of what Zittrain (2008) perceives as the ‘generative’ potential of the Internet. Free and open-source software development is the exemplary case of this participation, since it uses the Internet to organize a group of people whose actions then modify the material-technical form of the Internet. These ‘recursive publics’ have significantly contributed to the imaginary of the ‘open’ Internet as being especially participatory. The second section contrasts this historical ‘wired’ Internet with the increasingly ubiquitous ‘wireless’ Internet, examining the overlap and tension between how social aspects of the technology are imagined, and how it is designed, regulated and otherwise materially constituted. The section begins by examining the differences in the materialities of mobile Internet access devices and the ‘wired’ Internet, and continues by examining how the participatory cultures emerging in relation to the mobile Internet are different than the ‘recursive publics’ of the wired Internet. Opportunities to ‘open’ mobiles exist, but in many cases they are limited by material, legal and organizational structures.
The history of the Internet and especially of the idea of the ‘open’ Internet illustrates the way that particular social values can become articulated—connected—with technological design features (see Slack 1997). It also demonstrates how particular technological affordances can lay the groundwork for the emergence of particular social and cultural forms. Along with the technical choices made about specific technologies, normative and cultural aspects also combine to shape the forms of communication that emerge. We can think of the Internet as a form of communication that is formed of technical structures as well as of organizational frameworks, notions of governance, and images of the future. Many histories of the Internet have acknowledged this socio-technical coproduction, examining how existing collaborative processes of university research scientists contributed to the network structure of the early Internet (Abbate 1999) as well as how elements of a ‘hacker culture’ that emerged in the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab in the 1960s influenced the cultures of production that came to characterize the Internet.1
These specific reflections contribute to a broader analysis of the interplay between social and technical imaginaries of the Internet, or what we in this book consider as the ‘materialities and imaginaries.’ This interplay is particularly interesting to scholars working at the interface of media and communication technologies and the tradition of science and technology studies (STS). Broadly speaking, this intellectual space is concerned with the coproduction of ideas about things, the social practices established around things and the things themselves. Patrice Flichy (2007) argues that the social imaginaries of new technology are as strongly influenced by the way that people think about and construct them as they are by the technology itself. Technologies therefore operate as sites of knowledge transfer or exchange (Bowker and Star 1999) and as elements of controversies that mobilize opposing social or cultural perspectives (Callon 1981). In one of the defining works on coproduction, Jasanoff (2004, 2) defines it as being “shorthand for the proposition that the ways in which we know and represent the world (both nature and society) are inseparable from the ways in which we choose to live in it.” From this perspective, we can see how the material infrastructure of technologies like the Internet is produced along with the symbolic infrastructure of the social. In the past, this symbolic infrastructure was focused on individual liberty. More recently, it has become associated with participation: through the participatory ‘Web 2.0’ and also through various open-source movements.
The coproduction of the technical, cultural and normative aspects of the ‘open’ Internet are well illustrated by the way that specific ideas about the social value of openness have been connected with specific technical choices, and secured through norms such as standards and protocols. These three elements are key to how the ‘open’ Internet has developed.
One key feature of previous and current imaginaries of the Internet has been the significance of the political and cultural values articulated with the design and function of a ‘network of networks,’ which can conflict and overlap with how such a network is conceived of in its ideal form. These values have often been identified as ‘freedom’ and ‘openness,’ although these are not exactly identical. As an illustration, consider the names of some of the more prominent nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) active in lobbying for digital rights: these include the Electronic Freedom Foundation, the Open Network Initiative and the Open Technology Initiative of the New America Foundation. These evocations of the Internet’s liberty and freedom have long histories. As computer historians and sociologists, including historian Fred Turner, have noted, the cultural values of Californian Internet geeks have tended toward the individualist and libertarian (Turner 2006). In particular, ‘openness’ has been a key point of contact between peer-to-peer cultural practices and neoliberal ideologies, although it is often problematically conflated with individual freedom. In her 2013 work exploring how software production coproduces politics and code, Coleman analyses how the individual freedom that free software coders sought and developed through their individual practices in some ways operated as ‘theatre of proof’ for a broader openness of ‘artistic, academic, journalistic, and economic production’ (2013, 185). This unstable and yet productive relationship between the political ambiguity of free software and the replicability of its norms and values across a number of contexts has made it very influential. The idea that a reprogrammable Internet is an ‘open’ Internet has wound its way through discourse about the technology from the early age of the Web, maintaining expectations that the Internet provides space for its own construction.
The fascination with the ‘open’ Web also has historical roots in the conflation of libertarian values and technical architecture. Take for example, John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,” where he writes,
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
(Barlow 1996, n.p.)
This libertarian discourse focused on the specificity of the online environment relative to the jurisdictions over which states had governing responsibility. This perspective was typical of mid-1990s perspectives assigning the Internet special status by virtue of the architecture and function of its technology. Barlow continues,
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
(Barlow 1996, n.p.)
These claims that the Internet has particular features that make it impractical or ideologically problematic to regulate (like a network structure and a global reach) have been remarkably persistent. Hofmann (2009, 2) argues that these claims are part of a “utopian vision of autonomy and creativity” that contrasted traditional, switched telecommunications with a distributed, autonomously connected network of networks: an Internet. Where the original switched network embodied a “bureaucratic model which emphasizes collective security, stability and regularity” (Hofmann 2009, 5–6), the utopian imaginary of the Internet suggested an alternative where the intelligence belonged to the users of the network, who could use the noncentralized network to communicate without limits.
The political expectations of the development of an Internet as opposed to centralized and switched network are expressed in a set of essays by David Isenberg in which he lauds the potential of the “stupid network” in which interconnection is valued over the “intelligence” of pre-Internet telephone networks. Isenberg thought of the stupid network as a philosophy, writing that “A new network “philosophy and architecture” is replacing the vision of an Intelligent Network. The vision is one in which the public communications network would be engineered for “always on” use, not intermittence and scarcity. It would be engineered for intelligence at the end-user’s device, not in the network, and the network would be engineered simply to “Deliver the Bits, Stupid” (Isenberg 1997).
In a 2002 update of the “stupid network” idea, Isenberg, along with David Weinberger, argued that managed “best networks” would be less beneficial than open networks. This technical recommendation (itself based on a business case assumption that open networks would include ever-increasing amounts of bandwidth) includes an explicit political proposition:
In fact, the best network embodies explicit political ideals—it would be disingenuous to pretend it didn’t. The best technological network is also the most open political network. The best network is not only simple, low-cost, robust and innovation-friendly, it is also best at promoting a free, democratic, pluralistic, participatory society; a society in which people with new business ideas are free to fail and free to succeed in the marketplace.
(Isenberg and Weinberger 2002, n.p.)
Political openness and technical openness are explicitly aligned here. In contemporary imaginaries of the Internet, we find the same sentiments, expressed through the names of the NGOs mentioned above. We can also find rhetoric explicitly linking open networks and democratic political values in the language of lobbyists advocating in favor of net neutrality regulations (Powell and Cooper 2011) and in the political discourse of political leaders including Hillary Clinton and David Cameron (Powell 2011). The salience of this imaginary of openness, however, is also solidified through social norms including a tradition of peer governance of the Internet that, in part, has occurred through the development of technical standards and protocols. Like the free software programmers that Coleman discusses, the early hackers, geeks and technocrats who established the protocols over which the Internet operated (including Isenberg, Barlow and others) also established mechanisms for the debate and approval of those protocols, which allowed the network to be designed in ways that echoed the political and social interests and values of this group.
The early Internet was designed as an open and interoperable network, with the ‘intelligence’ at its edges, as Isenberg pointed out. This openness was secured by the core standards and protocols governing the function of the network. The Internet Protocol, along with the Transport Control Protocol, together prescribe the interconnection of the Internet.2 These protocols were originally developed by engineers David Clark and Vint Cerf but each new version of these—and any other technical aspects of the Internet protocol—are presented to the worldwide community of Internet designers through documents called Requests for Comments.3 Braman (2011) notes that these documents, in addition to defining technical standards through review by the entire community of Internet designers, also provide sites where some of the most important political issues of the early Internet were discussed.
The ‘wired’ Internet operates on standards and protocols which, in many cases, have been agreed through a process of community review, and codification has been a key part of the technical design of the ‘wired’ Internet. The review by designers has also been a key part of its governance. Technical decision-making regarding the standards and protocols is the responsibility of standards-setting bodies, notably the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).4 This task force is open to anyone who wishes to attend its meetings, and is in theory a nonhierarchical organization that bases its decision-making on “rough consensus and running code.” Eschewing voting, decisions are made by consensus, sometimes even by asking participants to hum (and then considering the volume of humming in the room as an indication of ‘rough’ consensus). As for the running code, a key aspect of the original governance of the Internet was that many decisions about how data moved and communications were put in place were delegated to the protocols that had been agreed by the community. If the code or protocol worked (technically) that was a convincing argument for continuing to use it to build the Internet. In combination, these technical and normative aspects combined to create a de facto system of peer governance of the Internet, in which technically skilled Internet designers made decisions about how the Internet ran, that they hoped would be in tune with their values.
Peer governance expanded along with the Internet, although not always without difficulty. These transnational advocacy networks, as Mueller (2010) points out, deliberate across borders, and have established international institutions such as the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), a United Nations-supported multi-stakeholder meeting which was itself established after several World Summits on the Information Society (WSIS).5 These institutions deliberately engage multiple stakeholders beyond the technical experts whose ‘rough consensus and running code’ governed the Internet to begin with. The WSIS and the IGF, in particular, have attempted to expand governance decision-making to include not only states and corporate entities but civil society as well. As Held and McGrew (2003) note, this process was originally meant to shift the form and the process of governance from one based on confined, state-level decision-making toward negotiation across a variety of levels. “Multistakeholder governance means that representatives of public interest advocacy groups, business association or other interested groups can participate in intergovernmental decisions alongside governments” (Mueller 2010, 7–8). Raboy notes that these decision-making fora “form the basis of a new model of representation and legitimation of non-governmental input to global affairs,” and as a result, “the rules and parameters of global governance have shifted” (Raboy 2004, 349).
Taken together, the new transnational and nonhierarchical institutions that govern the Internet introduce opportunities to make the Internet a technology managed by its peers. Thus, the standards and protocols that technologically defined the Internet have also, over the past decade, helped to reiterate and develop shared cultural norms.
Besides the design of standards and protocols, and the human systems of governance that order them, much of the software that supports the function of the Internet is also constructed as ‘open’—because it is developed and licensed as free or open-source software (FLOSS). ‘Share-alike’ licenses, including the GNU Public License (Stallman 1999), stipulate that software products based on free software code must be released to a common repository for reuse. The Free Software Foundation’s goals were to define, using the framework of copyright law, a mechanism through which software code produced from free software source code would always be available for community reuse. In a way this alternative approach reiterates the kind of peer governance developed by the IETF, which claimed ‘running code’ to fulfill the same governing purpose as consensus on the definitions of new standards or protocols. In time, the governance of free software also gave rise to the expansion of open-source software practices, although not all open-source software licenses have stipulated that code must be returned to commons. To an extent, FLOSS alters the hierarchical structure of the traditional firm (see Stark 2006) by allowing individuals to self-organize and, in the case of free and open-source software, to create collective repositories of common knowledge. Increasingly larger corporations have begun to integrate open-source production into their business models, further blurring the lines between the commons and the proprietary, and creating more complex integration between horizontal and hierarchical organization (Benkler 2006; Coleman 2013). This facilitation of participation and maintenance of a knowledge commons again creates greater opportunities for shared governance, as Bauwens (2009) points out. The movement of FLOSS practices also illustrates how imaginaries—and indeed ideologies of ‘openness’—are transported through certain communities of practice to become relevant in locations and contexts in which they had not been before. In some of these new contexts, the original values connected with ‘openness’ shift. In the case of open source, the recasting of free software as “open source” and the creation of licenses that no longer required the return of software code to a commons created a linkage between the commons and the market, reconfiguring the software industry to align with Benkler’s “commons-based peer production.” This ‘openness’ shifts from an openness imagined through libertarian ideals of freedom, and toward the kind of openness associated with liberal, free markets. This expansion and mutation of the value of Internet ‘openness’ accompanied the commercialization of the Internet.
The ‘wired’ Internet has carried forward design and governance features that link with the historical imaginaries of its openness. Now, various changes are impacting both the design and the governance of Internet resources, leading to a tension between the materialities and the imaginaries of the Internet. Some of the points of tension include pressure from national governments to censor or limit certain Internet services, and arguments from Internet service providers and other corporate actors to allow for more prioritization of the data moving across the networks, undermining the original design principle of “network neutrality” (Wu 2003). Yet very often, one of the most significant challenges to the openness of the Internet is not because of any individual regulatory decision but rather as a result of a large-scale shift in the modes of Internet access.
The increasing use of mobile devices for Internet access is a significant factor in the experience and framing of Internet openness. According to ComScore’s 2013 data, 125 million people in the USA use smartphones, and these devices account for 50 percent of mobile phones in that market (Lipsman 2013). The Pew Internet and American Life project estimates that 63 percent of adult mobile phone users go online with their phones, and 21 percent of adult mobile users do most of their Web browsing from their phones (Duggan and Smith 2013). Besides access to Web pages, mobile data services include email and applications, maps and Internet telephony such as Skype. In this shifting context we can see that ‘Internet’ use on mobiles is somewhat fluid: applications require data connections but not necessarily a connection to the global Internet, while email, even though it is transferred across the public Internet from its source, is delivered to mobile devices through proprietary protocols.
In the context of these shifts, it is significant that some materialities, including policies and protocols for mobile devices, are far less ‘open’ than those that developed around the ‘wired Internet.’ For example, in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently ruled that telecommunications companies needed to preserve network neutrality—except in mobile markets. This establishes a systematic shift in materialities away from openness and back toward some of the modes of control that were more common in the kinds of ‘smart’ communication networks that Isenberg pilloried in his original texts. Less attention is paid to these shifts, in part because of the way that the Internet has increasingly become an essential infrastructure—and hence, invisible. As Star and Bowker (2002) point out, it is the point at which infrastructures cease to become visible (that is, the point at which they become banal) where they have the most power. This represents the paradox of communication ubiquity: as Internet connectivity becomes increasingly expected, it becomes less clear how that connection actually occurs. As we will see, this creates the opportunity for a significant departure from the forms of governance developed by the ‘fixed’ Internet’s designers: the original Internet protocols were based upon open standards, so they worked the same way on a range of devices.
Other aspects of mobile materialities also play a role. Mobile devices have been developed in a different institutional mode than the original ‘open’ Internet, meaning that the architectural aspects as well as the standards and protocols are more constrained. The next section reviews how these constraints operate, before moving on to discuss the extent to which alternative cultures of production attempt to reinvigorate imaginaries of openness in the face of these constraints, through activities like ‘open-sourcing’ mobile phone production.
The historical organization of the mobile industry has influenced the architecture used by mobile Internet access devices. Historic competition between device manufacturers inspired the development of proprietary rather than open standards and protocols. Telecommunications providers, as compared to Internet service providers, have historically provided (and often owned) the access devices that their customers used. For example, the BlackBerry mobile device was one of the first to develop mobile e-mail; it uses a proprietary protocol and its own server systems to deliver email to mobile devices as soon as it arrives. In contrast, the IETF’s Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) protocols, which are open, are used for the same purpose on the ‘wired’ Internet across a range of devices. The allocation of radio spectrum to mobile operators by auction also contributes to the increasingly enclosed mobile architecture. Mobile companies bid on exclusive licenses to portions of the radio spectrum, meaning that mobile data, unlike Internet data, moves across a number of separate networks instead of one ‘network of networks.’ This seems like a potentially minor point, but the necessity for interconnecting many networks was one motivating reason for the development of interoperable and platform-agnostic Internet standards and protocols. In contrast, the single networks of the mobile operators represent a return to control of the entire process of data transmission—from sender to receiver. This is quite distinct from a ‘best effort” network like the Internet, where messages are separated into packets that are routed in various ways to their destination, according to well-defined protocols (i.e., TCP/IP). The principle of ‘net neutrality’ that underlies this form of data delivery has been protected on the ‘wired’ Internet by the FCC’s recent ruling, but not for mobile networks, who are permitted to block content or engage in any other kinds of control of content that they wish. These forms of technical enclosure, themselves linked to emerging policy frames, are the first example of mobile enclosure.
A second aspect concerns the way that users of mobiles experience limits to the kinds of devices they can choose, and the kinds of things they can do with them. Baer et al. (2011) compare several features of mobile device openness across the economies of Brazil, China, India, France, the United Kingdom and the United States, including consumer choice, usage restrictions and the scope for innovation coming from device makers, application developers and mobile operators. They conclude that mobile ownership is highly consolidated, with each major market having only three or four major players. Devices are often tethered to specific operators, and consumer choice is limited by long-term contracts and restrictions on device portability. They write, “Restrictions on device portability place limits on what users can do with their phones—preventing their use on competing carriers’ networks or on foreign networks when traveling, and denying access to certain apps” (Baer et al. 2011, 34).
Beyond these consumer issues, however, there are more significant concerns about the extent to which applications and the market for applications have influenced the openness of mobiles. One of the most significant changes to the experience of using mobile devices has been the development of applications. Introduced in 2008 with five hundred applications on offer, as of 2012 the Apple App Store hosted 450,000 applications, according to CEO Tim Cook (Indvik 2012). Before the introduction of these applications, manufacturers preinstalled applications like calendars onto mobile devices. The application market has allowed third-party developers (sometimes smaller companies or individuals) to produce applications for Apple’s iOS operating system or Google’s Android operating system. Comprising an effective duopoly in mobile applications, at least at the time of writing, these companies control the approval of applications that run on their platforms. Apple, in particular, has an extremely stringent approval process, refusing applications that it claims violate community norms. The company also restricts visitors to the applications stores located in their own countries. Instead of privacy and security issues being addressed through regulation, as they are within the historically regulated telecommunications sector, they are addressed through corporate policy and communicated to subscribers through often lengthy and detailed terms and conditions.
In November 2011, Apple stipulated that all developers wishing to build applications for the iOS will be required to add an extra layer of security to the wares they develop, which limit the extent to which these applications interact with the operating system (Goodin 2011). Apple and Google often stipulate that data produced by someone who uses the applications can be gathered, retained and used by the parent company—though not by the application developer. This means that app developers cannot easily benefit from the data developed through their applications. App developers are also bound by the terms and conditions set for them by the owners of the platforms, set out in software development kit licenses (SDKs)6 that define how applications must be programmed in order to work properly. These SDKs can be highly restrictive. Ironically, Google’s Android platform is based on an open-source software stack, yet its SDK clearly stipulates that the finished app is actually the property of either Google or Android. In contrast to the “recursive publics” (see Kelty 2005) of Internet users who built software to improve the function of the Internet, and who established some principles of peer governance through involvement in standards-setting, the app economy is a one-way process where the products created by app developers help to secure valuable data for the mobile phone companies, add to the value of the devices and cede developers’ code to the device owners. For their part, developers are paid for their creations, and may gain reputation and status by being associated with a particularly well-made application. However, unlike the ‘open’ contribution structures of the wired Internet, which invited not only contributions to various open-source projects where code is maintained for use by others but also contributions to the development of open standards, the ecology of application development is far less open. In particular, it employs the logic of contribution without the logic of the commons.
The move to a mobile Internet returns many forms of corporate control to the communications ecosystem, and adds new forms such as the management of the app economy through the solicitation of contribution without the facilitation of peer governance. Yet alongside these enclosures of common knowledge and architectural shifts away from openness, alternatives are also emerging. The final example I consider is of a project that aimed to completely open-source the development of a mobile phone, examining its aims and goals, and the eventual outcomes of its aims.
The Openmoko project was an attempt to create an entirely open mobile phone, including hardware, software and governance of the production process. This project was led by Sean Moss-Pultz, who was a product manager at a Taiwanese company that produced motherboards and other electronic hardware. In the press release that accompanied the launch of the project in 2006, Sean is quoted as saying, “For the first time, the mobile ecosystem will be as open as the PC, and mobile applications equally as diverse and more easily accessible … Ringtones are already a multi-billion dollar market. We think downloading mobile applications on an open platform will be even bigger” (Openmoko 2007). The project aimed to create a common platform for mobile application development, based on the Linux open-source operating system, as well as common storage models and libraries for applications. It solicited participation from open-source software developers, people engaged in building mobile applications, and hardware hackers as well.
In early 2007, Openmoko launched the Neo1973, the world’s first open-source smartphone. With the launch of their first product, the project expanded the scope of their open-source aims to include a product development process that explicitly involved participation from a group of motivated amateurs—much like other open-source projects, but unusually, also including the company’s development roadmap. In February 2007, the project’s website included the following outline of the process:
Our company is unconventional, we openly share our roadmap, and your participation, in terms of actual code, hardware features, suggestions, and usage-scenarios will shape product features of our future devices.
Each product we build follows a three-phase development model that repeats annually:
We will give away free phones to selected members of the developer community. At this point, the full source code to the product will become publicly available. We are committed to cooperating with the community in the interest of making the official developer launch a smooth experience. Also, at this time, all the community websites will be updated with content from the new device.
We will sell the Neo device direct from openmoko.com. Sales and orders will be worldwide. We are specifically targeting open source community developers.
Online sales will continue. We will also be available in a retail stores and selected carriers around the world. At this point, we hope your mom and dad will want to buy a Neo, too. The next generation Open-moko device will also be introduced at this time.
We want your involvement in Openmoko. Now is a great time for us to work together. You’ll have our full support. We’re dedicated to helping you “Free Your Phone.” And we’re always looking, listening, and hungry for new things. It is our goal to be totally market driven.
(Openmoko 2007, n.p.)
On the community’s mailing list, Moss-Pultz repeated the same message, adding:
Our goal is freeing end-users and businesses alike from proprietary constraints. We’re about encouraging people to modify and personalize their software to support their individual needs.
Building products as we do, we strive to enable people to connect and communicate in new and relevant ways, using their own languages and their own symbols…. Your participation, in terms of actual code, hardware features, suggestions, and usage-scenarios will shape product features of our roadmap.
(Openmoko Community Mailing List, February 2007)
The Openmoko project solicited enthusiastic participation from developers around the world, who wrote software, recommended changes in functionality and even self-produced viral video advertisements for the Openmoko phones. The devices that the company manufactured, including the Neo1973 and the later Openmoko FreeRunner, released in 2008, were sold with the expectation that developers would make modifications to the software, hardware and firmware. As one contributor to the publicly archived Openmoko community mailing list described, the project’s application development platform created a close connection between hardware and software and placed considerable power over the functionality of the phone in the hands of individual developers:
For me the close tie in with the hardware is what interests me in the project. It is not just software. You have access to the accelerometers data, gps data, wifi, and all the open hardware. I feel that will lead to the best possible solution for the phone. It is the software working together with the hardware that truly makes the neo 1973 and openmoko such a powerful tool.
(Openmoko Community Mailing List, July 2007)
The project provided a way for developers to engage in hardware modification and for the company to use committed participants as beta testers for their projects, a strategy that was entirely new for mobile development at the time, although it was a common practice in open-source software development more broadly. One thing that make Openmoko’s approach unique was its stated commitment to keeping the development process ‘open’ and allowing community members to observe and participate in the design process.
The broader forms of openness sought by the Openmoko developers posed challenges for the project leaders and the relationships they formed between their community of developers and the manufacturers of their devices. While community members wanted more access to design schematics, manufacturers were bound by nondisclosure agreements. It became increasingly evident that the structure of the mobile development process made it difficult or nearly impossible to continue to involve the community in decision-making about the device’s production processes. In 2008, Sean and other core project members founders posted mailing list messages aimed at their most active developers, encouraging them to continue buying and experimenting with the Openmoko devices but not necessarily to expect that they would be able to substantively contribute to the development of a smartphone device. At the same time, other participants in the Openmoko online community had an expectation that if the were going to buy one of the smartphones, it should be a functioning consumer product, as the following list posting from 2008 illustrates:
Third request: what *is* the warranty on the Freerunner? The warranty is essentially non-existent. It’s supposedly 14 days “D.O.A..” Dead On Arrival, in its strictest definition, means that as long as the phone boots up, that’s it. It doesn’t matter if it’s not really functional. As long as it boots up, it’s technically not “DOA.” If it can’t make phone calls or connect to the Internet, too bad: it’s not “DOA.” If the GPS antenna doesn’t work right, because of a hardware flaw, too bad: it’s not “DOA.” While I’m glad they’re trying to put out a phone that’s “open,” I’m very disappointed in their lack of customer support. I mean, it’s not some throw-away piece of crap. It’s a $400 phone!
(Openmoko Community Mailing List, August 4, 2008)
The Openmoko phone attempted to make more parts of the mobile phone open, by using open-source software, making hardware schematics open and by sharing its roadmap on the community list. Yet even among the open-source communities who participated in the development process, expectations remained that it was more important for mobile devices to operate seamlessly and be easy to use than it was important to be able to modify the phone.
The current state of the Openmoko project says a lot about the success of certain types of ‘openness’ and the limitations of others. After the launch of the FreeRunner in 2008, the project floundered, perhaps in part due to the incongruities between the expectations it established for developers and those it established for ‘mass market’ consumers—or perhaps because by this time, Apple had launched the iPhone. Compared to the Openmoko project devices, the iPhone completely lacked the open standards and libraries for application development, was based on proprietary software and, at the time, did not support any third-party applications. Yet the iPhone was an extraordinary consumer product, and as explained above, its mass market eventually permitted the development of contribution-based application stores, albeit extremely enclosed ones.
Despite the demise of the Openmoko project, the idea of using open-source practices to solicit application development for mobile devices has been carried forward by the Android project, which developed an open-source stack for mobile phones that was partly structured around open-source libraries and the open-source derived SDKs mentioned above. The Android project attempted to do much the same thing, except instead of creating a unique hardware project, it worked with existing manufacturers of smartphones through a trade organization called the Open Handset Alliance (OHA). The OHA contributed to the development of the Android software stack, ensuring that the software could be used on a variety of devices built by a variety of different companies, Android was acquired by Google in 2009 and Android is the operating system for roughly 50 percent of the phones used in the U.S. as of the end of 2013 (Arthur 2014).
The saga of Openmoko and the parallel rise of Apple and Android smart-phones implies various ways that openness is desired, resisted or reappropriated within mobile ecosystems. Recently Openmoko has reemerged as a community project, managing the distribution of updated versions of the Neo1973 and FreeRunner prototype phones, and providing access to the source code for the Linux operating system. The goal of this project, according to its website, is “to nurture explosive innovation (such as occurred with the Personal Computer) in the field of connected mobile computing, cellphones, and ubiquitous computing” (Openmoko.org 2011). Compared with the potential opportunities for peer governance put forward by Open-moko’s opening of its design roadmap, the maintenance of a platform primarily used by amateurs is less profound. Instead of openness secured by peer governance, it is contributing to a new market for open-source kits and tools, in line with similar projects that market ‘open hardware’ to amateurs who wish to experiment with redesigning electronic circuits (Buechley and Mako Hill 2010). This consumer-oriented openness is one of the forces behind the success of open-hardware movements, but its expanded distribution of hardware products and support of communities of practice seems largely a result of the openness of the Internet, rather than necessarily a development of its open governance across a new platform.
The Openmoko project was an attempt to introduce radical openness to the entire production process of design and manufacture of mobile devices, with results that hint at an overall shift in the mobile ecosystem away from peer governance and toward consumer consumption. This is echoed in the way that open-source processes have featured in the mobile ecosystem. Open-source contribution economies such as the application development process are clearly an important part of the current smartphone market—and indeed important for the continued utility of smartphones. Yet the economy of contribution facilitated by SDKs that provide open libraries but continue to retain the benefits of contributed app developer labor suggest that there has been a broad shift away from a framework in which developers can claim some stake in the results of their labor. This is one of the most significantly and worrying differences between the ‘wired’ and the ‘mobile’ Internet, from a perspective of labor and design.
The open Internet has some specific historical qualities that are related to the way that particular values became connected with features of its design. These created opportunities for participation in imagining the ideal frameworks for design and governance of the Internet, as well as other forms of open production including open-source software development. As everyday media practices shift to mobile platforms, individual consumers may not be aware of what they are losing in terms of openness. One of the core problems here is that we collectively share a social perception that the Internet is a technology that can support or enable individual freedom, collective participation and a range of versions of the slippery concept of ‘openness.’ As the practices of Internet users and the value propositions of the companies who provide connectivity to it begin to change with the adoption of mobile phones, the social practice of open governance that typified the review of Internet protocols no longer applies to the proprietary protocols used in mobile devices. The imaginary of openness does not disappear, of course—part of the influence of the FLOSS movements has been the idea that it could and should be possible to participate in the construction and governance of communication systems. What happens is that the imaginaries of openness intersect in complicated and challenging ways with the materialities of the mobile Internet. These materialities include the design of the objects but also the ways that they are embedded into particular economic, legal and social systems.
While projects such as Openmoko have attempted to address this discrepancy and bring open-source principles to the mobile realm, the promulgation of their open imaginaries is often stymied by expectations related to the materialities of mobiles. A functioning device is often more important than an open contribution framework. The ability to easily make, sell and buy apps can trump the opportunity to govern the mode of communication. The ease of use of devices like the Apple iPhone renders ‘open’ products clunky and pointless by comparison. Even the opportunities to transform the mobile ecology are shallow: the ‘app ecology’ open-sources the beginnings of the creative process and recuperates the value of the results.
What opportunities for openness remain? Are any of them as generative as the openness that developed over the ‘wired’ Internet? Certainly, there are disruptive practices of opening mobiles: the practice of ‘modding’ mobile phones by replacing their software or firmware allows some of the constraints established by the network operators to be transcended. Mods range from the very basic—‘jailbreaking’ a phone to allow it to work on a different network or to load applications blocked by a particular service provider—to the highly complex—replacing the memory, the antennas, the microphones, or the motion sensors in consumer devices. Modding hardware means breaking warranties and thus violating intellectual property laws. It’s disruptive to the hardware industry in ways that are deeper than the challenge of a peer-production project like Openmoko, but not very well-distributed.
Perhaps it is unhelpful to expect that mobile communication platforms will recapitulate the specific openness of the Internet. Indeed, this very openness is somewhat of a historical and cultural accident, resulting from the intersection of subcultural values with the unusual expansion of a new form of communication. Yet the result has been transformative to the openness and democratic potential of our communication, in so many ways. Regardless of whether the same kinds of conditions can be met within a new communications mode, we need to develop ways and means for shared governance to apply to our communications environment. Our ability to maintain the democratic exchange of information that enriches our world depends on it.
1. Abbate’s work is the first in an evolving field of Internet histories that stress the relationships between the design of Internet systems and the social and technical imaginaries into which they are embedded. Other works in this genre include Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture, which situates the emergence of both ‘virtual communities’ and Silicon Valley entrepreneur-ship in a particular positioning of the California counterculture; Gabriella Coleman’s history of the political debates couched within practices of hacking and free software development; Milton Mueller’s Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace, a history and analysis of debates about how to govern the addressing system that underpins the Internet; and Zittrain’s work as discussed above. There are also related works that stress social imaginaries more strongly, such as Robin Mansell’s Imagining the Internet, or material structures, such as Laura de Nardis’s The Global War for Internet Governance.
2. Together, these protocols are known as TCP/IP, and they specify how Internet data should be formatted, addressed, transmitted and routed, as well as separating the function of the Internet into several layers in order to ensure that it operates as an end-to-end network.
3. You can find the RFC Editor, which lets you view these documents, at www.rfc-editor.org.
4. In addition to the IETF and other bottom-up standards organizations the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet standards-setting bodies include the International Telecommunications Union (the ITU), which operates under a mandate to the UN, and the World Wide Web Consortium (the W3C), which brings together member organizations and the public. For more discussion of Internet standards-setting, see Brown and Marsden’s Regulating Code: Good Governance and Better Regulation in the Information Age (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2013).
5. The World Summits on the Information Society were established by UN mandate, and events took place in 2003 in Switzerland and 2005 in Tunis. WSIS events concluded in 2005 with the establishment of the Internet Governance Forum, a non-decision-making forum where governments, civil society representatives and commercial representatives debate issues related to the function of the Internet. These forums are held annually, and you can view the archives as well as find out how to participate at http://intgovforum.org.
6. An SDK includes tools for technical integration of the application, as well as specifying arrangements for intellectual property and payment relating to application development.
Abbate, J. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Arthur, C. “Three Graphs to Stop Smartphone Fans Fretting about ‘Market Share.’” Guardian Technology. January 9, 2014. Accessed September 9, 2014. www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/09/market-share-smartphonesiphone-android-windows
Baer, W., F. Bar, Y. Hong, J. Mailland, A. Mehta and L. Movius. “Comparing Mobile Openness: Case Studies of United States, United Kingdom, France, China, India and Brazil.” 39th Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy. Arlington, VA, September 23–25, 2011.
Barlow, J. P. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” February 8, 1996. Accessed September 9, 2014. https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html
Bauwens, Michel. “Capital and Class in Peer Production.” Capital & Class. no. 1 (2009): 121–141.
Benkler, Y. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Bowker, G., and S. Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
Braman, S. “The Framing Years: Policy Fundamentals in the Internet Design Process.” The Information Society. no. 5 (2011): 295–310.
Buechley, L., and B. M. Hill. “LilyPad in the Wild: How Hardware’s Long Tail is Supporting New Engineering and Design Communities.” Presented at DIS Conference 2010, Aarhus Denmark, August 16–20, 2010.
Callon, M. “Pour une sociologie des controverses technologiques.” Fundamenta Scientiae. no. 3/4 (1981): 381–399.
Coleman, G. Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Duggan, M., and A. Smith. “Cell Internet Use 2013.” Pew Internet and American Life Project.” 2013. Accessed September 9, 2014. http://pewInternet.org/Reports/2013/Cell-Internet/Summary-of-Findings.aspx?view=all
Flichy, P. The Internet Imaginaire. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.
Goodin, D. “Apple requires Mac App Store candidates to be sandboxed.” The Register. November 3, 2011. Accessed September 9, 2014. www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/03/mac_app_store_sandbox/
Held, D., and A. McGrew. “Introduction.” In The Global Transformations Reader, 1–31. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.
Hofmann, J. “The Libertarian Origins of Cybercrime: Unintended Side-Effects of a Political Utopia.” SSRN eLibrary. April 1, 2009. Accessed March 8, 2014. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1710773
Indvik, L. “App Store Stats: 400 Million Accounts, 650,000 Apps.” Mashable. June 11, 2012. Accessed September 9, 2014. http://mashable.com/2012/06/11/wwdc-2012-app-store-stats/
Isenberg, D. “The Rise of the Stupid Network.” Computer Telephony. (1997): 16–26.
Isenberg, D., and D. Weinberger. “The Paradox of the Best Network.” 2002. Accessed March 8, 2014. http://netparadox.com/
Jasanoff, S (ed.). Ordering Knowledge, Ordering Society. States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Kelty, C. “Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics.” Cultural Anthropology. no. 2 (2005): 185–214.
Levy, S. Hackers. New York: Doubleday, 1984.
Lipsman, A. “2013 Mobile Future in Focus.” Comscore Whitepapers. February 22, 2013. Accessed September 9, 2014. www.comscore.com/Insights/Presentations_and_Whitepapers/2013/2013_Mobile_Future_in_Focus.
Mueller, M. L. Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.
Openmoko. “Openmoko Announces the World’s First Integrated Open Source Mobile Communications Platform at Open Source in Mobile Conference in Amsterdam.” 2007. Accessed March 8, 2014 (page no longer available, September 9, 2014). www.openmoko.com
Openmoko Community Mailing List. n.d. Accessed September 9, 2014. http://open-moko-public-mailinglists.1958.n2.nabble.com/
Powell, A. “Freedom Abroad, Repression at Home: The Clinton Paradox.” LSE Media Policy Project Blog. 2011. Accessed September 9, 2014. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mediapolicyproject/2011/11/02/freedom-abroad-repression-at-home-the-clinton-now-cameron-paradox/
Powell, A., and A. Cooper. “Discourses of Net Neutrality: Comparing Advocacy and Regulatory Arguments in the US and the UK.” The Information Society. no. 27 (2011): 311–325.
Raboy, M. “The WSIS as a Political Space in Global Media Governance.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. no. 3 (2004): 347–361.
Slack, J. “The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies.” Social Research. no. 3 (1997): 989–1004.
Stallman, R. “The GNU Operating System and the Open Source Revolution.” In Open Sources-Voices from the Open Source Revolution, edited by DiBona, Ockman, and Stone. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 1999.
Star, S. L., and G. Bowker. “How to Infrastructure.” In Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs, edited by L. A. Lievrouw and S.Livingstone, 151–162. London: Sage, 2002.
Stark, D. “Social Times of Network Spaces: Network Sequences and Foreign Investment in Hungary.” American Journal of Sociology. no. 5 (2006): 1367–1411.
Turner, F. From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Wu, T. “Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination.” Journal of Telecommunications and High Technology. no. 1. (2003).
Zittrain, J. The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.