My position on convenience is this:

• Good user experience is the convenience of not having to use a difficult and dangerous hand crank to start your car.
• The Mac App Store is the convenience of having McDonald’s open in your apartment building.

Of course, everyone is free not to eat at McDonald’s exclusively, or even at all. But this is beside the point. The vast majority will appreciate the convenience, and grow accustomed to it. Soon, the idea of looking elsewhere for food will seem odd. The more adventurous will consider, perhaps, an occasional excursion to the nearby Burger King of Steam or other big brands, but the existence of more obscure alternatives will be little more than a strange piece of trivia. The McDonald’s in your apartment building will have a de facto captive audience.

The captive audience will have little grasp of what the limitations on their diet are, or whether the new baconburger of the week represents the true leading edge of hamburger innovation. They will have no idea whether the prices they are paying are fair, since there will be no market to compare with. If they want organic wholemeal buns with walnuts in, they’re out of luck, because their McDonald’s is doing fine selling the normal kind.

In short, with an effective monopoly on distribution, innovations that reach outside the box of the App Store agreement will not reach users, and there will be no incentive for Apple to cooperate in expanding the box.

I’m not a free market fundamentalist, but I will only approve of a monopoly if there is good reason to believe it will benefit consumers or the population at large in the long term. The App Store doesn’t come close. (Apple’s policy of rejecting apps that are “too similar” to ones already in the store ensure a true free market cannot develop within the store either.)

In the case of the iPad, my requirement as a potential customer has been a side-loading option of some sort, despite the knowledge that it would be very hard to be competitive outside the App Store. It is fundamental that I, as the owner of my hardware, can decide whether I want to install whatever software exists.

But for the Mac, coming at this distasteful compromise situation from the other direction is unacceptable. If the App Store succeeds – and it will, once the stupidity of the distribution agreement is reduced by the smallest possible amount – my next computer will not be a Mac. I will abide inferior, noisy hardware running inferior, noisome software before I abide a cage, be it ever so shiny.

For the record: no, I’ve never owned a game console.

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I urge all EU citizens to contact an MEP, via e-mail or (preferably) phone, and encourage them to support the Citizens’ Rights Amendments, which reaffirm net neutrality and anti-censorship positions adopted by the European Parliament in the first reading but subsequently removed by the Council of Ministers in their “common position”.

The primary purpose of these amendments is to make it explicit that the European Convention on Human Rights applies to internet and telecoms legislation. This should be obvious, but it is clear from the actions of politicians that it is not; it is all too clear that many see the internet as a frivolous toy, and civil rights obviously do not apply to toys. (It occurs to me that politicians are probably among those in the western world least affected by the digital communications revolution; if they need to communicate, they talk to their secretaries.)

Draft texts of the amendments (not yet numbered) can be found here: part I, part II, part III. There’s a (rather bad) campaign site here, and a less bad editorial – for all that it’s in a pointy-haired e-mag – in Computer World UK here.

This is not about programming. It’s about something that actually matters.

There’s been a little media coverage recently about a Swedish law that’s been in the works for a while. (The Register, Slashdot on The Register, The Local Edit: and IDG/PCWorld, European Digital Rights, Ars Technica; new portal site in Swedish). The law will permit the National Defense Radio Establishment (FRA, Försvarets radioanstalt) to carry out surveillance over the air and in cables crossing the Swedish border.

Surveillance over the air has been carried out since the 1940s, and satellite surveillance since 1976. This has been unconstitutional since 1995, when the European Convention on Human Rights was adopted as part of the Swedish constitution. The former second-in-command of FRA, Anders Wik, admitted this in a tape recording made public last saturday. This has received almost no attention in the Swedish press. Creating a law that permits the activity will make it legal under the EHCR¹.

The law was originally drafted by the Social Democratic Party, but withdrawn because it “received an unfortunate amount of attention”. It was reintroduced by the current four-party alliance in late 2006 (with a quick consultation carried out in the week between Christmas and New Year), but was suspended for one year by a rare minority veto instigated by the Social Democrats, who suddenly felt it should be adjusted to provide more checks and balances.

Defenders of the new law point out that it specifies that “military intelligence activity” [försvarsunderrättelseverksamhet] may only target “foreign matters” [utrikes förhållanden]. That restriction is actually already in place. However, it is the stated legal opinion of FRA that when they work for non-military authorities, such as the police, the customs office or the tax board, this is not “military intelligence activity” and is therefore not restricted to “foreign matters”. Besides that, determining that, for instance, an e-mail message is to or from a Swede involves analyzing it; as pointed out by the Council on Legislation, personal integrity is violated by opening the envelope, not just by copying the contents.

The obvious problem with this type of legislation is that it can easily be abused, especially when it’s written in very broad terms. However, there is another problem: even if it never is abused, the very existence of surveillance is oppressive and changes people’s patterns of communication.

A recent survey from Germany shows that a large portion of the population has changed or under certain circumstances would change their behaviour due to Germany’s implementation of the data retention directive. This “only” involves storing information about the participants in communication and their location. A law that allows essentially arbitrary civil authorities to order searches of the contents of people’s communication can be reasonably expected to affect behaviour more extensively. As such, citizens’ freedom of expression is curtailed. Without a functioning freedom of expression, democracy means nothing.

The proposed law is not a technical adjustment of foreign intelligence activity, as its defenders wish us to believe. It is a direct assault on democracy itself. It is expected to pass with a seven-vote majority eleven days from now, unless we can once again raise an “unfortunate amount of attention.”

Footnote: I know that we’re already being spied on by foreign agencies, but that’s less important. Foreign governments are not in a position to oppress us, except by taking over the government of Sweden. This is reflected by the Swedish bill of rights, which in several cases protects² the citizen “in his relations with the public institutions” [gentemot det allmänna].

¹ If you accept that it is “necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”
² Sort of. Except for the EHCR, the Swedish constitution is not enforceable.