David Berlind continues the discussion of DRM and Walled Gardens. Describing DRM as “wall-building material,” he says Apple, Microsoft and “now Google…[are] in a bout of may the best stovepipe win…returning the industry to the stovepipe structure that the Internet’s core protocol (TCP/IP) once promised to eliminate.”
Citing Larry Page’s comment at CES that “What we’ve seen with iTunes is that having a pretty good user experience is important,” David says:
Page is 100 percent correct. What Apple has proven with the way it has integrated its iTunes Music Store with the Internet, iTunes software (for Windows or OS X) and its iPods (and to some extent the iTunes phones from Motorola) is that if you can build an absolutely pristine user experience, people will take whatever drug goes with it no questions asked. Today, Fairplay — Apple’s form of DRM — is that drug. And it’s very addicting. Most people who are addicted to Fairplay-protected content (purchased through the iTunes Music Store) have no idea how difficult it will be to exit Apple’s walled garden should they choose to do so down the road (for example, if the latest greatest coolest hippest device that everyone must have isn’t sprinkled with Apple’s holy water).
Noting that “DRM is rough stuff,” David suggests that “identify management systems…the [identity] layer of the stack just below [DRM]” is an “even rougher” wall building tool.
Today, DRM is invariably based on your identity: some key token or combination of tokens like your e-mail address and a credit card that affirms your uniqueness from everyone else out there in userland. And if you think all the different DRM schemes are incompatible with other, try imagining the identity management systems that lie underneath them.
David suggests that incompatible identity management systems could seriously hobble the nascent “mashup” sector of the software and web services industry:
But, the mashup ecosystem is just getting started…there’s real interest in mashing up mission critical enterprise applications — the kind where identity management is a pre-requisite…What happens if the two systems a developer is trying to mash together into an identity-aware mashup use two completely different identity management schemes? Back in the 1999/2000 timeframe, when one of my responsibilities was to oversee the integration of Web sites like job matchmaker Dice.com into ZDNet (two sites that are identity-aware), reconciling their incompatible namespaces was an impossible task that require a significant amount of custom development. Now, I’m just trying to imagine this sort of integration — mashup style — for the masses (of mashup developers) and I don’t see identity aware systems getting bolted together as easily as the first wave of mashups were hooked up.
Let me rephrase: Is DRM simply a blade on the identity management system razor and are there a whole bunch of other blades that we’re not paying attention to?
Mitch Shapiro at 11:40 AM|Comments(0)
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