An interesting little story on Techrunch highlights an issue that may come to the fore more and more in the future. An iPhone app which relies on data provided by Amazon has had to be removed from the app store because Amazon has changed it API to prevent it accessing the information it needed.
The idea of a few big sites or companies acting as platforms on which smaller applications can be built is an important element of modern digital industries. Facebook and twitter are perhaps the obvious examples. However, the small start ups must also function in an environment where the large companies can pull the rug from under them and at whim with no notice at all. The iPhone app store is itself a great example of the power a larger company can weild over small developers.
This is a problem, because these small start ups have real potential to foster entpreneurship and drive development. Of course, we might argue that, in the long term, big companies want innovation on their platforms, so they will ultimately learn to be transparent and open in their decision making. However, if we are less optimistic about this prediction, this might seem like an important area to actually have government intervention. This would not be unproblematic, not least because the industries concerned necessarily cross borders. However, it is certainly something worth thinking about.
Hi Nick! I’m not convinced… I can’t think of a good reason to force Amazon to provide commercially-useful data, in real time, if they choose not to. With this web service Amazon wants developers to advertise products offered on Amazon (for which it pays small fees). If their developers commercialise that data for their own purposes, why shouldn’t Amazon intervene? But this is not just about Amazon’s right to exploit the financial potential of their own data. Above all, there is no ‘Amazon platform’ here, just a REST webservice piping out data on request to promote Amazon’s commercial activities. Imagine if the service went down unaccountably because of a technical failure. Should the government be on hand to intervene?
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Regulation is probably too strong a word. However, given that this is going to be an increasingly common relationship between large and small companies, I feel that it needs to evolve beyond the current, very informal nature, and certain rights and responsbilities should be enshrined for both sides.
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Then sign a contract? If you’re a startup, you owe it to yourself to secure contractual standing for the main tenets of your business. If you can’t – in this example because you’re using semi-open sources of data – then you need good contingency plans. Otherwise you simply accept that the rewards you seek carry commensurate risks. Open source technology and data is free because you carry all the cost of failure. One sure way to scupper interesting plans for ‘linked data’ would be to impose service-level obligations on the providers of information. They’ll just retreat.
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