Research update - Politics and Markets

Part II in the never-ending quest to find the perfect 'cocktail party lines' to succinctly and accurately describe my research. Actually, it's very helpful to a researcher keep restating her/his theses!

For Politics and Markets I am integrating document formats into the recent literature on the "networked information economy". The central idea of that literature is that this new information economy (with the Internet at its foundation) has replaced the previous, capital-intensive "industrial information economy". Any change to the structure of an economy threatens its incumbents, who in this case are both the traditional media and (ironically) the large telecommunications companies that own the infrastructure of this new network that so threatens their interests. Skype on your Xtra broadband connection to save on Telecom toll calls anyone?

What seems to have been missed is that most of the electronic work of the world is still done in documents, discrete 'containers' of specific information. For documents to work as tools, they need to be based on standards, so I can read what you have written and vice versa. Microsoft gained a monopoly on desktop computers with Windows through the 90's, leading to dominance of Microsoft Office and its proprietary, binary (i.e. non-human-readable) file formats. They became defacto standards. Recently, a competing XML (human-readable) file format (Open Document Format - ODF) was developed and released as an 'open file format'. This means no one vendor is in control of its development, and anybody is free to implement it in a free or commercial software package.

When the State of Massachusetts IT office mandated that government documents be stored in these formats and not Microsoft's defacto standard formats, there was a media and political furore. After the shouting, Massachusetts began the implementation using a plug-in for Microsoft Office that allows documents to be saved in ODF. The recently-released Microsoft Office 2007 has its own 'open format' (though there is some argument over just how open it is). This is in part a move by Microsoft to allay government and customer concerns about how their information is stored - everybody wants to access all their documents forever. After all, it is their data and they want to hold the keys to it. So now there are potentially two competing document standards, that for most users will be indistinguishable for most everyday uses. But what happens when you get emailed a document in a 'foreign' format? What if your government stores documents in only one of these formats?

This is a debate about:

• the cost to users of accessing public information
• the persistent storage of that information
• the ability of users to easily exchange their information
• whether one standard and competing implementations is 'better' than competing standards
• whether strong network effects of a defacto standard may, even after they open their standard, give one company "too much power to control the course of innovation" (James Boyle)

This is a difficult paper! I have to sift through technical arguments, economics, law and politics. It is, however, very very interesting.