First published in Biz2, 05/00.
Thanks to the wireless application protocol (WAP), the telephone and the PC are going to collide this year, and it’s not going to be pretty. The problem with “wireless everywhere” is that the PC and the phone can’t fuse into the tidy little converged info-appliance that pundits have been predicting for years, because while it’s easy to
combine the hardware of the phone and the PC, it’s impossible to combine their philosophies.
The phone-based assumptions about innovation, freedom, and commercial control are so different from those of the PC that the upcoming battle between the two devices will be nothing less than a battle over the relationship of the Internet to its users.
The philosophy behind the PC is simple: Put as much control in the hands of the user as you possibly can. PC users can install any software they like; they can connect their PCs to any network; they can connect any peripherals; they can even replace the operating system. And they don’t need anyone’s permission to do any of these
things. The phone has an equally simple underlying philosophy: Take as much control from the user as possible while still producing a useable device. Phones allow so little user control that users don’t even think of their phones as having operating systems, much less software they can upgrade or replace themselves. The phone, in other words, is built around principles of restriction and corporate control of the user interface that are anathema to the Internet as it has developed so far.
WAP extends this idea of control into the network itself, by purporting to offer Internet access while redesigning almost every protocol needed to move data across the wireless part of the network. WAP does not offer direct access to the Internet, but instead links the phone to a WAP gateway which brokers connections between the phone and the rest of the Net. The data that passes between the phone and this WAP gateway is translated from standard Internet protocols to a kind of parallel “W” universe, where HTML becomes WML, TCP becomes WTP, and so on. The implication is that the W world is simply wireless Internet, but in fact the WAP Forum has not only renamed but redesigned these protocols. WML, for example, is not in fact a markup
language but a programming language, and therefore much more difficult for the average content creator to use. Likewise, WAP designers choose to ignore the lesson of HTML, which is so adaptable precisely because it was never designed for any particular interface.
Familiar principles
The rationale behind these redesigns is that WAP allows for error checking and for interconnecting different kinds of networks. If that sounds familiar, it’s because these were the founding principles of the Internet itself, principles that have proven astonishingly flexible over 30 or so years and are perfectly applicable to wireless
networks. The redesign of the protocol lets the WAP consortium blend the functions of delivery and display so the browser choice is locked in by the phone manufacturer. (Imagine how much Microsoft would like to have pulled off that trick.) No matter what the technical arguments for WAP are, its effect is to put the phone companies firmly in control of the user. The WAP consortium is determined that no third party will be able to reach the user of a wireless device without going through an interface that one of its member companies controls and derives revenue from.
The effects of this control can be seen in a recent string of commercial announcements. Geoworks intends to enforce its WAP patents to extract a $20,000 fee from any large company using a WAP gateway (contrast the free Apache Web server). Sprint has made licensing deals with companies such as E-Compare to distribute content over its WAP-enabled phones (imagine having to negotiate a separate deal with every ISP to distribute content to PC users). Nokia announced it will use WAP to deliver ads to its users’ phones (imagine WorldNet hijacking its subscribers’ browsers to serve them ads.) By linking hardware, browser, and data transport together far more tightly than they are on the PC-based Internet, the members of the WAP Forum hope to create artificial scarcity for content, and avoid having to offer individual users unfettered access to the Internet.
In the short run this might work because WAP has a head start over other protocols for wireless data. In the long run, though, it is doomed to fail because the only thing we’ve ever seen with the growth characteristics of the Internet is the Internet itself. The people touting WAP over the current PC-based methods of accessing the Internet want to focus on phone hardware versus PC hardware