GeekPAC

Dear esteemed media,

Recently, you had a golden opportunity to engage in the time-honored journalistic tradition of truth-digging, only to fail. Miserably. You had the opportunity to nab a deceitful company, shine a spotlight on unsavory lobbyist types, bring to light one of the greatest ills of modern technology, make a case for the right to education, and play a role in demolishing the digital divide. You could have done all of that, if you had simply taken the few seconds required to uncover the truth. Instead, you did none of the above. You have failed the people of California and deserve to be exposed for your actions or, as in this case, inaction. I can only hope that this was a case of misunderstanding the problem and not willful ignorance.

And not only did you not do the above, you made the issues worse by making a simple mistake: you simply assumed that both sides of the debate were equally wrong and equally right, thus ensuring that the side which was most wrong – and who had the most to lose – was granted much more benefit than they deserved. You made the all-too-common mistake of assuming that if a company backs an assembly bill, it must mean that their argument cannot be taken at face value. You made the equally damnable offense of assuming that if a company backs a bill, it must at least have *some* legitimate argument, even if said company is not completely altruistic. And in this scenario, you end up obfuscating the real issues, confusing those who rely on you for information, and snapping defeat from the jaws of victory.

This is the story of Assembly Bill 1668, introduced in February, 2007, that would have guaranteed the right of Californians to our information, bought and paid for by our tax dollars. Instead, by trying to appear fair and balanced, you necessarily tilted the the advantage to the side that was provably false and – I will repeat this as often as necessary – with the most to lose. It is this point which should have made the journalistic coverage easy. After all, with the most to lose from AB 1668, those who lobbied against were willing to pull out all the stops, going so far as to state that requiring accessible documents meant destroying competitive markets and preventing choice. And yet no one in a position of authority bothered to point out the fallacies of these arguments.

AB 1668, on its face, was fairly simple: all government documents must adhere to the state of California’s definition of “open” – with open defined in the text of the bill linked in the left navigation of this site. Microsoft hated this bill, for obvious reasons. Microsoft Office controls the office suite market pretty handily, and Microsoft has made it a standard process to both a.) change their document formats often, thus encouraging steady revenue from users who have no other choice but to upgrade when told to do so and b.) obfuscate the formats of documents created by Microsoft Office, so as to ensure that no meaningful competition arises. Except that competition has come about in the form of the Open Source OpenOffice.org and the proprietary Star Office, sold by Sun and based on OpenOffice.org. Both of these use a standard format called ODF, which has been approved by ISO. Other office suite projects use this standard as well, although they do not have as many users.

OpenOffice.org and Star Office are both pretty good at providing a good percentage of the features that Microsoft Office users expect, except for one thing: neither of them are particularly good at exchanging complex documents with Office users. Given that Microsoft Office has not supported ODF in the past, and does so now only poorly, this effectively prevents OpenOffice.org and Star Office from winning new users from Microsoft Office. This is, by itself not so terrible. After all, Microsoft operates in a “free country” and so is free to do these things. They can produce documents in whatever format and serve their customers however they please. The question is not about what formats Microsoft chooses to support – the problem is one of access by all Californians to information produced by our state government with our tax money.

I operate from the simple premise that everyone deserves the right to access their legally obtained information, and this certainly includes California residents and their right to access documents issued by the state. Yet no state in the union, including California, nor our federal government recognizes this simple right. Somehow, this idea completely eludes our journalists as well. If you follow from that premise, it begs the question: how can citizens have the right to access information when they are forced to purchase the requisite software from a single vendor? The simple answer is that they cannot, and yet this is a point that members of the media and even the supporters of ab 1668 in the state assembly were loathe to make. It’s not as if this point is without precedent; when some states implemented artificial election barriers in the form of poll taxes to prevent some constituents from voting, the 24th amendment was passed. If states were to allow online voting and required that citizens purchase voting software in order to participate, would this behavior go unpunished? Absolutely not. What, then, of a state that erects barriers to entry for accessing information? Should this not fall under equal protection provisions? I certainly think so.

Over the course of the various legislative bills introduced over the past year in California, Oregon, Texas, Minnesota and Florida, Microsoft continuously argued that mandating open formats would in effect pick a market winner: ODF, and by extension, Sun, IBM and other supporters of the standard. Of course, they conveniently left out 2 facts: 1. ) Microsoft has been and is still free to participate in the ODF standardization process, and has chosen not to, yet no one has had the good sense to ask them why not 2. ) Microsoft is free to release its document formats under terms more agreeable to independent software vendors and Open Source developers, and no one has had the good sense to ask them why this is the case. Oops, I guess there are 3 points: 3.) while there are any number of competing vendors with ODF-based products, both open source and proprietary, there is only one vendor with an implementation of Microsoft-supported formats: Apple. Ha! I keed – that would be Microsoft. All non-Microsoft office suite vendors offer either limited support for Microsoft Office documents (Apple, Novell) or none. And there are no Open Source implementations. So, let’s see, one side offers a free document format used by many different projects, both commercial and non-commercial, and the other offers a non-free format only used by one vendor – its creator. So how did those lobbyists argue that an open formats bill would preclude competition? How does that work again?

Somehow, someway, our esteemed California media completely missed this story. I’m talking about you, LA times. I’m looking at you, San Francisco Chronicle. Hey KQED, you couldn’t be bothered with this story? They chose to believe if Sun and IBM picked one side and Microsoft the other, then that must mean that this was simply a battle of corporate behemoths ready to pounce on a market, right? If one chooses to ignore the facts of the case, then I can see how one could come to that conclusion – and this is exactly what our media chose to do, because even a cursory exercise in fact-checking would have turned up what I’ve written above. They completely failed to detect the difference between Microsoft-funded lackeys and genuine grassroots supporters like me.

Back to the equal protection stuff above – it has become exceedingly clear to me that, given our reliance on digital information and the increasing importance of digital data in our economy, we simply cannot afford to go any further without some protection of our information access rights. For centuries, human beings were guaranteed access to legally obtained information by virtue of the fact that anyone could read the printed word. Obfuscation of document formats simply wasn’t possible. Now that document obfuscation is not only possible, but in fact commonplace, we need legal protection of what one might call “the paper standard.” I have a hunch that such legal protection would alleviate digital divide problems, especially if such information rights were expanded to include internet access and multimedia content.

So how about it, California media – are you ready to apologize for your sins and change your behavior? Are you ready to dig for the facts and not simply accept what Microsoft tells you? Is it possible that you won’t simply take arguments at face value? Can you actually perform critical analysis?

For more on information access rights, see the BytesFree.org position paper here.

To see Microsoft lobbyists in action, see videos here, here, and here.