Real Online Competition: The Right to Exit
There has been a lot of news coverage of Google's "openness initiatives" over the past few weeks. The "Open Handset Alliance" promises to break the carriers' appliancization of cell phones. OpenSocial is designed to put its imprint …
Context & Ripple Effects
November 2007 has been a burst of openness announcements from Google: OpenSocial, framed by Marc Andreessen's blog as "a new universe of social applications all over the web," followed within days by the Open Handset Alliance carrier consortium aimed at breaking what madisonian.net calls the "appliancization" of cell phones. The commentary on this page steps back from both launches to ask a sharper question — whether "open" here means anything a user can actually act on.
That question lands against a backdrop the same week's data makes hard to ignore: ComScore puts Google's U.S. search share at 58.5 percent for October, one of its biggest monthly gains, while its proposed DoubleClick acquisition sits pending before regulators. The piece also notes a password-retrieval service whose convenience cuts against the exit story — openness rhetoric is easiest to evaluate when you ask who can leave, not just who can join.
First-order effects
- Developers writing to OpenSocial APIs gain a single integration path across participating social networks instead of rebuilding apps per platform, shifting build-once distribution from aspiration to shipped spec as of November 2007.
- Carriers that have controlled which software ships on their handsets now face an alliance-backed alternative — the Open Handset Alliance's stated aim is precisely to break that appliance model.
Second-order effects
- Competing social platforms must either adopt the OpenSocial API surface or defend closed ecosystems on grounds other than reach, since the cross-network pitch attacks the moat directly rather than the product.
- Regulators reviewing the pending DoubleClick deal gain a live counterweight to weigh against the openness narrative: a firm holding 58.5 percent U.S. search share arguing for openness invites scrutiny of where the control points actually sit.
Third-order effects
- If "open" becomes the standard competitive claim among platform owners, gatekeeping migrates from owning closed APIs to steering nominally open ones — the durable battleground becomes implementation control and default placement rather than the license itself.
- The user-side test the piece proposes — a real right to exit, including portable identity and data — would, if adopted as a policy benchmark, force openness claims to be scored on switching costs rather than press releases.
The trend: Platform competition in 2007 is moving toward openness declared as strategy, with the meaningful fight shifting from whether APIs are open to who controls their implementation and defaults.