The Courts Should Not Enforce Open Standards

A while back this article came through the Reuters RSS feed about someone bringing an antitrust case against Apple because he was “forced” to buy an iPod.  Now while my non-laywer opinion is that he has no chance of actually winning (hint: there’s a thriving competitive environment for online music with a wide range of viable alternatives that he could have gone to instead of the iTunes store), it does concern me that people think the courts should be used to enforce open standards.  Doing so would be hugely detrimental to the software world and harm consumers more than it helps them.

Don’t get me wrong, open standards are great and companies should be very strongly encouraged to use them, but that encouragement should come because consumers choose other alternatives and consider open standards one feature in their choices.  It should not be illegal for a company to invent a new protocol or file format and keep it to themselves – consumers should simply weigh up the disadvantages of not being able to integrate that product with other products they may want to use.  It’s about giving the customers choice, and that includes giving them the choice to use a product that doesn’t use open standards.  Why would they want to do that?  Perhaps because the open standard doesn’t allow for some functionality they want.  Perhaps because the product that uses a proprietary technology is just so much better suited to what the customer wants to do than anything else on the market.  Perhaps because they don’t care that they can’t use product XYZ with the product anyway.

More importantly though, companies need to be able to choose their business model.  It is not okay to dictate that companies have to go for a high-volume, low-profit approach and compete in a commodity market which is what tends to evolve when open standards are used exclusively.  When anyone can create a competing product, it becomes very hard to avoid the market becoming a commodity market because everyone keeps trying to undercut each other.  That’s good for the consumer in a lot of cases, but bad if it means that quality is reduced or innovation stops.  Sure customers can choose to pay more for a better quality product, but why shouldn’t that same thought process be applied to open standards?  Customers can choose to buy a product with open standards or a product that doesn’t use open standards – let the market decide how important open standards are.

It is worth noting of course that the iPod does play music files that aren’t bought from the iTunes music store and music from the iTunes store can easily be burnt to a CD (the most commonly used form of music distribution) so it’s a little hard to argue that the iTunes store locks you into the iPod, it just integrates with the iPod better than with anything else.  If you want something that integrates better with a different music player than consider that requirement when you choose which music store to buy your music from.  I don’t take my Hyundai to a Ford dealer for servicing(despite the fact that they could service it)  maybe you should consider taking the same approach with your music player and take it to a music store that provides the best service for it and free up the court room for some criminals.