[WG-InfoSharing] Interoperability in context
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John Wunderlich
Sep 18, 2020, 9:37:44 AM9/18/20
to Information Sharing Work Group
Hi Folks.
Happy Friday. The agenda for the month-end ISI-WG should be up by Tuesday next week. The plan is to continue the discussions on the PDURF. I encourage everyone to read the contribution and make comments on the Wiki. The more we can do on-line and asynchronously the faster we can get to actually producing the report for the community to start iterating on.
On a side note, I strongly recommend reading Cory Doctorow's
September 7th column in Locus Magazine. It's entitled IP but has a lot to say about interoperability and will be of interest to anyone in the ISI-WG. If you don't want to check it out on-line, here's the part that caught my attention:
What is “interoperability,” anyway?
The term is nerdy, technical, obscure. It’s closely related to the slightly more familiar “compatability,” but the two aren’t quite equivalent.
In a technical sense, “interoperability” describes two products or services that can somehow work together with one another. From opening your Word documents in Google Docs, to using third-party ink cartridges in your printer to replacing your watch band, to changing the stereo that came with your car, interoperability is a broad, universal, essential characteristic of all of our technology.
Interoperability is the default state of the world. Anyone’s charcoal will burn in your barbecue, just as anyone’s gas will make your car go. Any manufacturer can make a lightbulb that fits in your light-socket and any shoes can be worn with any socks.
Some of this is down to standardization: manufacturers, academics, regulators, and interested parties gather in “standards development organizations” to make this process simpler, describing the canonical direction and spacing of a lightbulb-thread, or the syntax of an HTTP request, or the fittings on the underside of your toilet.
This certainly makes interoperability smoother! Standards for paper, from weight (“grams per square meter”/GSM) to size (letter/legal/tabloid; A1, A2, A3, A4, etc.) make it possible for you to reliably buy paper that will work with your printer, without requiring additional trimming or other modifications.
A failure to standardize can make life hard for everyone. Early Australian rail barons laid their tracks in several gauges, leading to the “multi-gauge muddle” of a rail system where some cars and engines could not run on some of the tracks.
These barriers to interoperability aren’t insurmountable. If your paper doesn’t fit your envelope, you can fold it; if it doesn’t fit your printer, you can trim it. If the rail gauge doesn’t match your rolling stock, you can modify the undercarriages to allow for multi-gauge operation (a difficult operation to be sure, never implemented despite hundreds of proposals) or you can tear up some of the track and lay new ones (as Australia has done and promises to do more of).
Interoperability lowers “switching costs” – the cost of leaving behind whatever you’re using now in favor of something you think will suit you better. When my grandparents emigrated to Canada from the Soviet Union on a displaced persons ship, they incurred a high switching cost: for more than a decade, they had no contact with their family in Leningrad except through unreliable, slow word-of-mouth with the rare person who got a visa to travel there.
Contrast this with my move from the UK to Los Angeles in 2015: we are in routine contact with my in-laws in London and Wales, as well as my family in Toronto. My laptop and books came with me, as did our other personal effects. We left most of our appliances behind because they ran on a different voltage, but there were a few things we loved that we brought with and either changed the plugs on or connected to our house’s electrical outlets via transformer or adapters.
Companies like high switching costs. For a would-be monopolist, the best product is one that’s seductively easy to start using and incredibly hard to get rid of. Think of Purdue Pharma’s gleeful internal memos – revealed in leaks and court cases – about the ease with which their “customers” were getting started on opioids and how hard it was for those same people to switch away.
Addiction isn’t the only way to raise switching costs. Facebook makes it incredibly easy to get started, historically going so far as to tricking you into giving it access to your electronic contacts list to enmesh you in a network of others who’ve already signed up for the service. Once you’re on Facebook, it’s very easy to bring in articles from the public web, and to link to your friends’ updates on rival networks. You can start by just using Facebook to follow the friends you have there, but over time, the system nudges you toward using Facebook as your primary means of reading the news and even following what your friends are saying on non-Facebook networks.
But when you want to leave Facebook, there’s no easy way to do so. You can’t go to a Facebook rival and follow what your friends post to Facebook from there. You certainly can’t reply to what your Facebook friends post using a rival service.
Interoperability – the thing Facebook uses to slurp stuff in from the open web – is the key to self-determination. Leaving Facebook in the 21st century is like my grandmother leaving the USSR in the 40s: you can go, but your friends and loved ones are all held hostage behind Zuckerberg’s Iron Curtain, so leaving Facebook means leaving your communities, your relationships. That’s not as hard as kicking opioids, but it’s not easy either. And your presence on Facebook is the reason someone else can’t go.
Here’s the thing: everyone wants to minimize risk, from employers to workers, from Big Tech to its users. You want to use Google in ways that make your life better, and you don’t want Google to be able to arbitrarily change or remove the services it provides (ask me how bitter I am about Google nuking Reader, its RSS product!).
Google wants to ensure that you won’t leave the company or its products and services. It could improve its retention by making you so delighted with its offerings that you never consider leaving – but a surer, cheaper way is to interweave its products and services with your life: making sure that your kid can’t go to a public school without creating a Google account; embedding Google search in your mobile OS; releasing web- and app-development frameworks for third parties that quietly harvest the data of their users and send them to Google.
The more freedom you have to leave Google, the bigger a risk you present to Google. The more Google can lock you in, the lower the risk of your departure from the service – and the higher the risk that Google will cease to keep your business by making good products, and instead rely on retaining you because you can’t leave (or because leaving comes at a very high price).
Interoperability improves self-determination by safeguarding your ability change the your current situation by incremental steps: if you like your phone and the apps you have, but want an app that’s banned in its default app store, interoperability comes to the rescue, allowing you to add a second app store to your phone’s list of approved software sources. You get to keep your phone, keep your apps, keep all the data on your phone, and you get to install that unauthorized app.
Without interoperability, your choice is “take it or leave it”: if the app store blocks an app you want, the price of getting that app is throwing away your phone, all its apps, and some or all of the data you’ve painstakingly input into your phone. That unauthorized app needs to be pretty darned good before anyone would pay such a high price for it.
Writ large, interoperability encompasses things like democracy: when someone says they like their city but not its bylaws, we don’t tell them that the law is the law and the home comes with these bylaws in a package. Instead, we set out processes for amending or repealing laws that chafe the people they govern. And, if you fail in your bid to reform your city’s laws, you can move to another city without having to surrender the possessions in your home or your social relations with your old neighbors. Interoperability lets you replace the laws and keep your house, or replace your house and find new laws.
John Wunderlich, BA, MBA
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John Wunderlich
Sep 18, 2020, 10:18:25 AM9/18/20
to Information Sharing Work Group
Sal has asked to share this as well, which he put in the last meetings' chat. Of interest to those of you in the US
Have a better than average day,
John
"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
Jim Pasquale
Sep 18, 2020, 11:36:26 AM9/18/20
to John Wunderlich, Information Sharing Work Group, IEEE 7012 WG list
I wrote a blog about this earlier this year, perhaps some missed it.
Not a long read maybe helpful, you all be the Judges:
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Jim Pasquale
Sep 18, 2020, 11:39:57 AM9/18/20
to John Wunderlich, Information Sharing Work Group
Data Portability is so Yesterday!, The future is about Data Mobility, requiring less interaction in translating. Sadly the FTC is ten years behind our tech efforts.
Here’s a great primer from Liz:
https://www.consumersinternational.org/news-resources/blog/posts/data-mobility-the-good-the-bad-and-the-opportunity/
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