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Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems
"Born Digital" authors John Palfrey and Urs Gasser return with an argument about how we can improve interoperability, the principle that streamlines innovation and simplifies our lives.
307 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 5, 2012
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117 people want to read
About the author
John Palfrey
34 books25 followersJohn Palfrey is President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Before that, he was Head of the Phillips Andover Academy and a Professor at Havard Law School. He is coauthor of Born Digital: How Children Grow Up in a Digital Age, and author of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge volume Intellectual Property Strategy.
See also: John Gorham Palfrey
See also: John Gorham Palfrey
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 30, 2012
John Palfrey and Urs Gasser outline interoperability basically as interconnection between systems. A third collaborator—say a technologist or a system’s theorist—might have rounded out the definition just slightly but crucially to an increasing interconnection between systems. Implicit in the book's (mostly impressive) analysis is the myth of equilibrium: that some point down the line we get to a desirable (or acceptable) state, and nothing progresses from then on. Maybe the authors would object to that characterization since it’s not consciously implicit, like an imbedded ideology, but it's absent nonetheless. To be fair, if interoperability was better understood there’d be more books on it, and John and Urs do sample from a good deal of expertise, but the resulting advice—to aim for optimal interoperability rather than complete interop—comes across usually as a decision can lead one outcome almost as easily as it can lead to another or if you're not careful things can go down a more harmful route. Interop’s benefits are increased efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility, but too much interop can lead to privacy and security concerns, homogeneity and lock-in effects. Careful: “The optimal level of interop is highly context specific.”
Interoperability should be investigated in more of an evolutionary, lifecycle framework where, in pretty imprecise terms, we first see two distinct systems with no mutual or highly asymmetric information. With information exchange over time (and possibly a little goading) they reach a point where I think John and Urs would characterize things as optimal. But information exchange doesn’t stop there; it continues until there is something close to perfectly mutual information. At perfect information—i.e. complete interop—there are no longer two interoperating systems but one fused system now primed to begin the process anew with another distinct system.
And this does manifest in a different policy outlook. The way diesel pump nozzles won’t fit a gasoline car’s tank and vice versa functions as an analogy in the book for why some systems should be purposely non-interoperable. But the question for innovators (analogous to policy makers in examples of regulation) is not how to make gas pumps less interoperable, but how to make different engine types more interoperable. At the current state of technology, fine, it’s not possible, but long term considerations are critical for good policy.
John and Urs do an expert job at maintaining objectivity with one exception that might be a stumbling block depending on where you fall on the issue of internet privacy. I mention it because it’s in many ways a continuation of the last point. One of their down-the-road interop challenges we’ll face is the Internet of Things. “It is not clear to many people whether in fact [the Internet of Things] should be built at all.”; “Although the grand vision of the IoT, in which billions of things are connected with each other is still a dream (or for many people, a nightmare)…”; and “And yet despite these early successes, the vision of the ubiquitous Internet of Things—a system that connects large parts of the physical world with the digital—remains primarily on drawing boards and in computer science laboratories. Some people may prefer it to remain there, merely a concept for experimentation in universities and corporate R&D facilities.” Here's another issue where the authors think the judicious use of purposeful non-interop might be the way to go. With so much interconnection the IoT poses a huge threat to personal privacy. But privacy itself seems to be another area where there’s too little not too much interop—i.e. too little interop between private, public, professional and all the other ways we compartmentalize our lives. Part of the solution is allowing time to do what it does to social norms. It’s a question really of how much we want to delay technical innovation to allow ourselves time to adjust—and how possible it even is to delay.
The authors do a good job defending the market while allowing that even a laissez-faire government constructs a medium in which the market functions. They elaborate on this in a number of helpful ways but are almost silent on patent and copyright reform. Although it’s a subject that warrants its own book, if government is never not in the background, poorly conceived patent and copyright laws serve as barriers to interoperability in all the wrong places. (Larry Downes’ The Laws of Disruption handles this subject nicely).
Despite a few shortcomings this is not at all a worthless book. The authors are both out of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Berkman is multidisciplinary enough to generate a lot of really fascinating material, but it is a part of the law school, and in the end Interop does get something of the law academic’s treatment. If you're still undecided, here's a nice little video of a presentation the authors did at Berkman for the book's release. If you're satisfied after watching it you probably won't get a lot more out of the book. If it excites you, read away.
Interoperability should be investigated in more of an evolutionary, lifecycle framework where, in pretty imprecise terms, we first see two distinct systems with no mutual or highly asymmetric information. With information exchange over time (and possibly a little goading) they reach a point where I think John and Urs would characterize things as optimal. But information exchange doesn’t stop there; it continues until there is something close to perfectly mutual information. At perfect information—i.e. complete interop—there are no longer two interoperating systems but one fused system now primed to begin the process anew with another distinct system.
And this does manifest in a different policy outlook. The way diesel pump nozzles won’t fit a gasoline car’s tank and vice versa functions as an analogy in the book for why some systems should be purposely non-interoperable. But the question for innovators (analogous to policy makers in examples of regulation) is not how to make gas pumps less interoperable, but how to make different engine types more interoperable. At the current state of technology, fine, it’s not possible, but long term considerations are critical for good policy.
John and Urs do an expert job at maintaining objectivity with one exception that might be a stumbling block depending on where you fall on the issue of internet privacy. I mention it because it’s in many ways a continuation of the last point. One of their down-the-road interop challenges we’ll face is the Internet of Things. “It is not clear to many people whether in fact [the Internet of Things] should be built at all.”; “Although the grand vision of the IoT, in which billions of things are connected with each other is still a dream (or for many people, a nightmare)…”; and “And yet despite these early successes, the vision of the ubiquitous Internet of Things—a system that connects large parts of the physical world with the digital—remains primarily on drawing boards and in computer science laboratories. Some people may prefer it to remain there, merely a concept for experimentation in universities and corporate R&D facilities.” Here's another issue where the authors think the judicious use of purposeful non-interop might be the way to go. With so much interconnection the IoT poses a huge threat to personal privacy. But privacy itself seems to be another area where there’s too little not too much interop—i.e. too little interop between private, public, professional and all the other ways we compartmentalize our lives. Part of the solution is allowing time to do what it does to social norms. It’s a question really of how much we want to delay technical innovation to allow ourselves time to adjust—and how possible it even is to delay.
The authors do a good job defending the market while allowing that even a laissez-faire government constructs a medium in which the market functions. They elaborate on this in a number of helpful ways but are almost silent on patent and copyright reform. Although it’s a subject that warrants its own book, if government is never not in the background, poorly conceived patent and copyright laws serve as barriers to interoperability in all the wrong places. (Larry Downes’ The Laws of Disruption handles this subject nicely).
Despite a few shortcomings this is not at all a worthless book. The authors are both out of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Berkman is multidisciplinary enough to generate a lot of really fascinating material, but it is a part of the law school, and in the end Interop does get something of the law academic’s treatment. If you're still undecided, here's a nice little video of a presentation the authors did at Berkman for the book's release. If you're satisfied after watching it you probably won't get a lot more out of the book. If it excites you, read away.
February 23, 2015
This book is dry academic over defining fluff.
December 7, 2024
Excellent! A must read about the layers of interoperability - horizontal, vertical, conditional, as-if, and more. As a business and healthcare leader this book was paramount for me about how we need to preserve information and knowledge into the future, connect ourselves in healthcare, finance, social media, cloud-computing, and more.
February 13, 2021
A pamphlet in book form. No real useful axioms or points to take from this book. No meat. Bad. Given a star beyond one because the way it is written is not horrible, just the repetitiveness and the uninteresting subject matter.
November 27, 2013
Although there's some good concepts being presented here, as well as some good background info on the net and how it came to be, most of the book is redundant. The authors start out with a good definition of interoperability and what it means for technology as it continues to develop, but then the rest of the 300 or so pages is just reiteration. I feel the repetitiveness just serves to show that they were padding the text so it could be a considerable length, when really they could've cut it down to about half the text's length and still properly illustrate "the promises and perils." Perhaps this would've been better presented as an informational website and not a book. The authors even give the reader a URL in the conclusion that leads to more scenarios of interop issues and feel puzzled as to why they didn't just include some of the more complex cases instead of recapping the same handful they introduced in the first half of the book.
One last note, for those that grew up with technology, a lot of this book will seem like old news to you. I wouldn't really recommend this book to anyone who is well-versed in today's technology, because the concepts presented here seem to be more for people who have little or no knowledge of IT in this day and age.
One last note, for those that grew up with technology, a lot of this book will seem like old news to you. I wouldn't really recommend this book to anyone who is well-versed in today's technology, because the concepts presented here seem to be more for people who have little or no knowledge of IT in this day and age.
May 12, 2013
Interesting but a bit dry at times.
July 30, 2013
I had hopes for the book - until I read the first chapter and realized that this book was a long form essay stretched into a book. There isn't a there there.
Read
January 2, 2015I co-wrote it so should not rate!
Read
May 31, 2016great
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews