Standing on big tech's shoulders

Adversarial Interoperability is a mouthful, and also a concept most of us have heard very little about.

The reason it rarely came up as an issue in business, governance or consumer society, was that up until very recently, it was something we just had. In fact, modern society couldn’t exist without it.

On its own, 'interoperability' is the process of allowing a new product or service to work with an existing product or service.

Entire industries depend on these standards and have done so for a very long time. We need to be able to put any dish in any dishwasher, any appliance into an electrical socket, any VHS video tape into any VHS VCR, any USB charger into any USB socket, any brand petrol in our car, and any car onto any road for that matter.

It’s all around us, and it’s all-important.

Innovating through the enemy

But where the rubber really hits the road, is when we allow for adversarial interoperability.

It is this which allows for truly vibrant, innovative and competitive marketplaces – the kind of market places which can only result in rich consumer and investment ecosystems.

Adversarial interoperability is when anyone can create a new product or service which can plug into existing ones without requiring permission from the companies that make what it plugs into.

The type of economic activity that this might include would be third party printer ink, app stores not run or controlled by Apple or Google, or being able to get the glass on your smartphone replaced without it voiding a warranty, or independent repair shops being able to fix your phone, car or even your tractor.

One of the reasons the tech sector was so dynamic since the dawn of the personal computer era was adversarial interoperability.

Firms could go from top of the tree to the scrap heap rapidly, and startups could emerge from nowhere because they could hitch a ride on existing platforms and add significant value where lazy incumbents didn’t.

But the once scrappy startups, and now big tech, have pulled up the adversarial ladder they once climbed up themselves.

How big tech got big

Take a quick look under the bonnet of all our most successful technology firms, and you’ll find a story of adversarial interoperability.

The entire PC market which spawned the internet was built on the legal capability for IBM clones.

When Apple was on its knees around 20 years ago, they worked hard to reverse engineer Microsoft’s office suite despite Microsoft’s continued efforts to thwart it.

Microsoft eventually succumbed to MS Office user pressure and allowed for documents to flow between the two operating systems, only because the market demanded it. If this was thwarted, Apple would probably not have survived and literally trillions of dollars of market capitalisation via Apple may have never arrived.

Even Facebook made a tool which allowed it to log into people's Myspace accounts using their credentials to gather waiting messages for that user. It then let people reply to their Myspace friends via Facebook and leave a little message asking others to come across with an ad for Facebook. Mind you, this was a software capability that once Facebook had utilised, it lobbied to have closed down successfully – one reason we have a company with 2.6 billion unsatisfied users!

What we have seen in recent years from the same big tech firms are moves to create laws, regulations and court decisions which restrict adversarial interoperability.

You know a capitalist ecosystem is starting to break down when it only has five dominant species. These days the most common question startups are asked when pitching for VC money is this:

Which of the big tech companies is likely to buy you.?

It’s in fact assumed that competing with them isn’t possible because their competitive moats run so wide and deep – much of which is held up by the lack of ‘plug and play’ that adversarial interpretability provides.

While this impenetrable power of big tech firms might seem investor positive, we only need to think back to command economies of the communist era to see where this ends up.

Capitalists economies need competition to thrive, when it gets circumvented, we end up in a period of stasis and protectionism, where the outsized returns that created the burgeoning tech sector, become tools to stop the next breed of outsized investor returns from arriving.

The next era

Now that data is pervading every corner of the physical economy, we need to ensure things can work in concert regardless of who it is made by. The next era of technology is going to go far beyond the screen.

The internet of things means that dominant tech platforms will be all-pervasive in our economy.

Our cars will essentially become rolling computers ensconced with big tech software running inside them – think Apple Car play on steroids. Our houses are about to become computational cages with Amazon battling Google for dominance in this realm, and the outdoor world will literally have eyes, ears, noses and perfect memories.

What we need in an economy being built around data are consumer and investor options which aren’t the take it or leave it monopolistic position provided by big tech.

If we want to have the efficiency and safety benefits of smart cities, then it’s prudent that new firms can emerge other than Google and provide consumers with a choice outside of Google’s preferred surveillance capitalism model, one which could provide a more citizen-centric business model.

If our cars are going to all be electric then we’d need a standard charging outlet, and the ability for independent software operators to become our modern day mechanics.

If people are going to invest $2000 in a smartphone, they should be able to upload whatever software they choose, and developers ought not to be hit with a 30 per cent toll for trying to sell to consumers via the app store.

Local giants

It’s become pretty clear that opting out of big tech is not an option, now that their software is infiltrating our physical world.

Locally, we’ll need the ability to innovate through their platforms of dominance – beyond what they currently allow. Waiting for long-overdue international antitrust isn’t a strategy – it’s a wish.

We need to create the ability for local entrepreneurs and corporations to utilise the platforms big tech have created in an adversarial manner, and to do this, we need to set our own local agenda and pass laws which allow for innovation by standing on the shoulders of giants.

We need to do what they did. Just because it’s digital, doesn’t mean it’s not possible.

Historically we set our own laws on industrial products entering our market, and we can do it again with digital.

If they threaten to leave our market – we should let them – maybe then a better local version of what they provided could pop up, and be the local yet global tech hero we’ve all been waiting for.