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07/24/01
Cherish Your Liberty While You Can
by Jake Davenport
Every year in July Americans celebrate their freedom by commemorating the day upon which the Declaration of Independence was submitted to the British king. That Declaration was in response to the punitive acts of tyranny perpetrated by the British government at the expense of liberty, due process, and reason. The struggle for independence and freedom continues in many places in the world today, and the latest battleground is your PC. Instead of some foreign dictator, though, we now face the avarice of giant corporations located in our own land, the worst among these being Microsoft.
In the past six months Microsoft has launched an all-out assault on the current way we interact with our computers. Today we own our computers, we "own" the licenses to the software that is installed there (so, for example, we can get a new computer and move all of our programs to it as long as we delete them from the old one), and we are permitted to exist in anonymity. Tomorrow, if Microsoft has their way, while we'll still pay through the nose for over-priced hardware mass produced in Taiwan and Singapore, we will lease the software that we use on our computers, Microsoft will monitor what changes we make to our systems, and we will be forced to give up personal information for the privilege. Microsoft seeks to become king of the digital world, and you and I will become the serfs who tend this cyber-land and pay the taxes for using it to grow our virtual crops.
It would be naïve to say that this is not a big deal. Microsoft's track record is hardly encouraging. Don't forget that Microsoft is still (supposedly) being investigated by a strangely emasculated Justice Department for potentially violating anti-trust laws, for contempt of court, and for other crimes against the consumer. While at first I believed the lawsuit to be a frivolous one with an outcome potentially more negative to the consumer than not, of late I have seen enough to convince me that Microsoft is a very dangerous organization and, left unchecked, could soon garner enough information through simple usage monitoring (if it hasn't already) to blackmail every law-maker in this country.
If this sounds paranoid, keep in mind that the world's most successful company has no intention of losing out in a marketplace where hardware and software sales have slumped dramatically, along with innovation and demand. This drop in software and hardware sales is most prevalent at the small to midsize business and the personal consumer levels, the two largest markets in the world. After all, if there is enough processing power for most of us to type a document or do our taxes, why would we need to go out and buy ever-faster systems with even more memory? Why would we need to purchase the latest and greatest office suite if what we have will suffice?
From the outside one cannot help but suspect Microsoft has carefully crafted a plan that will enable it to extend its top-dog position in the software market indefinitely. First they created operating systems with horrible security holes, then demanded that we pay for the fixes with upgrades. Then they created software that ran on those same operating systems and had as bad or worse vulnerabilities. Through this they shaped an environment where millions - millions! - of users were made unknowingly vulnerable to catastrophic virus programs and malicious hackers. Even as I type this, there are hundreds of thousands of computers that have been usurped by 13-year old kids because Microsoft has left the key taped to the doorknob.
If that's not bad enough, over the years Microsoft has absorbed the majority of innovative competitors (did you know that MS invested millions in Apple to insure its solvency in order to point out that they had competition when the Justice Department declared war?). Like auto manufacturers dealt with the hydrogen engine patents of the 1950's, Microsoft has used the mighty dollar to remove the majority of threats to their market share and stifled any innovation in the process. Where Microsoft couldn't buy the competition, they waited it out, giving away products like Internet Explorer in order to destroy companies like Netscape that lacked the ability to bundle their products with the world's most ubiquitous operating system. And in places where neither of those tactics worked, they leveraged their marketing muscle and targeted the general consumer with propaganda, preying on the least knowledgeable and most gullible to achieve their ends.
The list goes on. Microsoft, years ago, branched out from building just operating systems. Knowing the internal mechanisms of their own operating systems has given Microsoft the ability to create faster, more efficient programs than its competition ever could (think MS Word vs. WordPerfect). Their willingness to hide features, especially at the programming level, has resulted in numerous lawsuits, most of which helped inspire the initial anti-trust suit. But of course squishing the competition extends even to itself - Microsoft has made it impossible for its latest Office software to read documents created in older versions, presumably to force users to upgrade in order to maintain compatibility.
And now, when the majority of the world has jumped onboard the Microsoft train through ignorance or convenience, Microsoft is declaring war on the end-user in the name of copyright protection. Under current proposals, Microsoft wants to charge business customers a license renewal fee after a period of time, even if that company does not wish to upgrade to the latest version. Microsoft has made it so that their terms of service give them the right to audit the networks on which their software is installed and has lobbied Congress over the years to impose stricter sentences and outrageous fines for any breach of license.
Indeed, Microsoft has been fairly explicit about their desire to have us all leasing our software on a per-use basis within the next few years. They've also stated that the latest consumer version of Windows (XP stands for "Experience" or perhaps "Exploitive"), due out in October, will not function unless it's registered. Of course, once it's registered you will be "allowed" to modify your system only slightly (one example of a common modification would be installing a new hard drive) or you'll be forced to re-register in order to continue to use your own system. The Office XP software, available on shelves now, already forces you to register and may disable itself if you make changes to your system, requiring a call to Microsoft for a new unlock code. Will Microsoft be available at 2am on a Sunday?
Additionally, Microsoft is committed to working with large special-interest groups like the Recording Industry of America to make sure that you can't use certain media files outside of the context they've decided for you (for example, there's rumor that the XP OS will not allow you to copy MP3's to Zip drives or other portable media). In other words, Microsoft and the other large corporations it has allied with will control what you see, when and how you see it, as well as what you can do and when and how you can do it - and they will know each and every time that you do. In many ways, this is already true - the next generation of operating systems and software will simply close the cuffs about our wrists.
So I say to all of you still reading this bile-filled missive: are you willing to accept a homogenous computing world where all programs interact smoothly with one another at the expense of innovation, freedom of choice, and personal or corporate privacy? Do you want your computer habits tracked and monitored, logged and recorded, circulated from one marketing company to the next? Do you want to trade your independence, so hard won 225 years ago, for the nipple of the corporate behemoth because it's convenient and easy to use?
If the answer to any of the above for you is yes, then continue to buy Microsoft products - you'll get what you deserve. Me, I'm going to draw a picture of the Windows XP box and toss it in the Boston harbor next time I'm there.
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