War on General Purpose Computing

Final post of the year probably and one to think about over the final hours of 2011 and wonder what will happen in 2012...

The Coming War on General Purpose Computation

By Cory Doctorow at 9:26 pm Tuesday, Dec 27 

The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.

At least in the mobile arena we've already seen a move from the "general purpose" web browser to paid applications which effectively act as front-ends to (often) freely available content.

Now as the presentation above points out this is partly because of a new revenue model not working in the customers' best interests but also because of the controls being placed upon consumers and users of content and devices. An extremely worrying trend where the distributors have final say over what YOU can read and consume - and at the same time monitoring your behaviour as part of the deal for you to consume that media and information.

Information which used to be free in the availability sense (and not necessarily in terms of price).

I used to joke that Apple said "There's an app for that" - one which already did the job of your perfectly good web browser but for a cost, while Nokia should have said, "You don't need an app for that" due to the presence of a web browser.

The advantage for Apple here is that you had to pay for both the application (to read your free content) but also submit yourself to behavioural data collection and provide numerous personal details for the priviage.

Happy 2012....