In the majority of the software world, companies and open source projects alike compete with one another in terms of quality, cost, documentation, ease of use, and necessary program features. A small, unethical portion of the market sees things a different way; companies in this minority category want to find a way to force people to buy their products. Today I present you with two examples of such underhanded business tactics: Microsoft and SafeMedia Corp, both of which are petitioning governmental entities to legislate them into hyper-profitability at everyone else's expense.
In Microsoft's case, it's pushing to have its proprietary MS Office file format become the standard for government documents and communications both in states in the US and entire countries in other parts of the world. Obviously if Office's file format is made the standard, that will impel governments to buy large numbers of Microsoft Office licenses, and Microsoft will make a lot of money. One could argue that if Microsoft made a superior office suite with competitive features at a reasonable price, such dirty tricks would not be necessary.
The other company is one you likely have not heard of -- SafeMedia Corp. It's a small, Florida-based corporation that produces a P2P network traffic block technology. Though it is implemented in a dedicated appliance (the Clouseau), SafeMedia's long-term goal is to get its filters into cable modems. The filtering technology does not just involve ports -- it seems to actually filter out certain kinds of protocols that indicate BitTorrent and other distributed file sharing technologies ala programs like FrostWire and KaZaa. Unfortunately, according to my testing, it also weeds out a large number of false positives in the form of legitimate BitTorrent traffic. Integrating SafeMedia's technology into cable modems would be a disaster for ISPs, broadband Internet customers, BitTorrent Inc., and anyone who uses distributed filesharing technologies to distribute their products or services. But SafeMedia would make a lot of money, and that is why its CEO, Safwat Fahmy, provided written testimony to both the US House of Representatives and the Senate that shamelessly plugged his products as the perfect solution to unwanted filesharing. Quoted in part from an email press release sent to me this morning by SafeMedia's PR firm:
SafeMedia Corporation CEO and Founder, Safwat Fahmy outlined the dangers and risks of contaminated P2P networks today (Tuesday, July 24, 2007) in his written testimony before the U.S. House Of Representatives Committee On Oversight and Government Reform, at the "Inadvertent Filesharing Over Peer-To-Peer Networks" hearing. The SafeMedia Chairman focused how P2P networks operate, the features and characteristics of "contaminated" P2P networks. Fahmy also explained in his written testimony how SafeMedia's technology was developed to address illegal sharing of copyrighted materials on contaminated P2P networks and how it will help to protect consumers, students ,businesses and our national security from the serious privacy, identity theft and security risks.
And:
Historically, Fahmy told the Senate hearing, "P2P networks were developed to overcome limitations on bandwidth and processing/storage so arguably there were some benefits to using P2P networking as opposed to the client-server model. But frankly, the historic reasons for developing P2P networks do not exist in today's world: limitations on bandwidth and processing/storage are easily remedied by clustering many low cost servers and the deployment of wideband fiber to deliver even more powerful performance than P2P networks."
So BitTorrent is made obsolete by clusters and fiberoptic Internet services? I can't trust Mr. Fahmy's expertise when he makes statements like that; clearly he does not understand the fact that BitTorrent is used by companies who cannot afford hugely expensive hardware and bandwidth resources. It is not a luxury -- it's a necessity to many software and media businesses. But how can I trust him anyway? Fahmy is directly involved with a business that sells products that would benefit from this testimony's acceptance, so in effect the testimony is one big sales pitch. His words are biased in favor of profits, and tainted with misinformation that unnecessarily polarizes the issue, and therefore meaningless before the congressional committees -- or at least we must all hope that our elected representatives are smart enough to understand this. Presumably they have been in politics long enough to know when they're being wooed by greedy CEOs or their lobbyists.
Just as disturbing are Microsoft's dirty tricks in getting its OOXML file format adopted as a standard in the state of Massachusetts and the country of Portugal (among several others in Europe and South America). But Microsoft is under greater scrutiny and faces opposition from both the open source software community and corporate competitors Sun Microsystems and IBM, both of which have an interest in seeing the competing OpenDocument format gain wider adoption. In contrast to Microsoft's proprietary OOXML, OpenDocument is an open standard that is free to implement in any software, so it is not platform-dependent like OOXML, which is currently only implemented in Microsft Office 2007. Consumers will not suffer any consequences of OpenDocument becoming a state or national standard because they can download and use the open source OpenOffice.org suite to view and edit them. If Microsoft wins the format battle, you may be forced to buy (or "pirate") MS Office 2007.
What concerns me more than Microsoft and its Office format is SafeMedia's congressional manipulation. The issue has made it into an amended Senate bill which will control education funding. If the corporations that will benefit from this -- SafeMedia, the MPAA and the RIAA -- succeed, they will make money and we regular citizens will suffer by losing federal funding for 25 colleges and universities as they struggle to prevent P2P file transfers. Such prevention is an exercise in futility; even the SafeMedia technology does not filter out direct file transfers via email, FTP, HTTP, or SSH. To filter out all "bad" traffic, you also have to filter out some or all of the legitimate traffic as well, crippling the network's usefulness and limiting the ability of those 25 institutions to teach and conduct research.
If only Microsoft and SafeMedia made products that sold themselves without legislative help. If only their sales pitches focused on competitive quality, features, and pricing, there would be no need to try to force people to become their customers. Perhaps the awful truth is that people do not want to spend a lot of money on Microsoft Office 2007 (and by extension, Windows Vista), or they make good use of P2P filesharing and don't want it filtered out. This practice of lobbying our governments to force us to use substandard or unwanted products is nothing short of predatory capitalism, and I think it stinks.
Editorial commentary 
