Technologist Bob Frankston is mad and not going to take it any more. His set top box won't let him use his high resolution monitor to watch HDTV video. Treating consumers like criminals is well established in the P2P world where Hollywood sues its best customers. What's disturbing is that Intel and Microsoft have been co-opted into this authoritarian vision.

Frankston lays out a strong case that adding complexity stifles innovation and cripples the market and consumer options.

For those who believe that one can predict the future and that the world is organized into nice hierarchies it makes perfect sense to add mechanisms to the pile and leave it to the prescient of incumbent business to define and limit us to that future. It confuses business with marketplaces. For those who recognize a rich evolving world such efforts to limit opportunity do far more damage than just deny us the ability to innovate. It makes it very difficult to use what we have because the only combinations that work are those that are anticipated.

We don't "solve" complexity by layering on top of it. When we design systems we have to go underneath the system expose the simplicity.

(Credit the EFF for the catchy title.)

Marc Freedman
RazorPop, developer of TrustyFiles, the leading multiple network P2P file sharing software
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