Threatened from every side, what are the Big Five to do?
As I write this thousands, perhaps millions, of coders are pouring through servers looking for cul-de-sacs that lead to Log4J. Maybe your site is patched, but whose code does your site call? Or the site one layer below that? It’s a race against the hackers who are testing the locks and leaving behind backdoors of their own for later; a metaphor for an endemic coronavirus, wildfires and epic storms that have upended lives in the real world.
2021 is likely to mark the permanent shift away from offices and commutes and towards delivery and virtual socialization. While these trends first appeared in 2020, we all expected some “return to normal” but now know there’s no going back. Once supply chains find their new configuration and economies regain their footing, the New Economy is likely to be less tightly integrated than the one it replaces. We can thank broadband, software, and big data for enabling real-world re-engineering. But we can also blame social media and greed for destabilizing outcomes that may yet prove fatal for an ordered society.
For the Alliance and the tech community we represent, it was a mixed but often hectic year. We enjoyed a big win at the U.S. Supreme Court in our defense of open APIs but ended the year in front of the European courts challenging the bureaucrats working to dismantle mobile ecosystems. We celebrated as tech took on the role of keeping society moving, finding goods online, equipping businesses to work virtually, and bringing help to communities in need. We also watched as politicians and policymakers around the world blamed big tech for the failures all around them while the tech giants themselves started pushing against each other.
Several things became crystal clear in 2021. First, politicians everywhere have identified big tech as the enemy, as an easy political punching bag, and as a source of revenue via increasingly alarming fines and sanctions. Second, as mobile, e-commerce and digital media have grown to eclipse their tethered and non-digital counterparts, there is a growing call to socialize tech as fundamental economic infrastructure, like the railways and then telecom before them. And Third, it is now universally acceptable for countries around the world to extend their digital lawmaking globally rather than stop at their own borders. This final trend is the one that I believe will have the most profound impact, as the only management mechanism is to fracture the internet into a hundred nets with toll gates in between.
Developers everywhere should take note of these three big shifts. Each will have a profound impact on your business in the next couple of years. Should today’s ecosystems be dismantled, you will each be tasked with building and managing an ecosystem of your own in a vastly more fragmented and complex market. Coding will likely be the smallest of your new tasks. If tech becomes truly regulated, we can expect innovation to move in new and unpredictable directions; both a blessing and a curse. And of course, as the internet continues to balkanize, markets will shrink and localize creating new but smaller opportunities and the death of the global business case.
In the year ahead the Alliance will be focused on influencing how the internet and ecosystem regulation evolve in an attempt to maintain harmony in a global digital economy. We will increase our efforts to educate policymakers on what developers do, what can be done to help our community succeed, and to differentiate the millions from the five big companies politicians have targeted for radical change. We hope you’ll join us in helping us all be successful in our work.
Happy Holidays, and all the best for 2022,
Bruce
CEO, Developers Alliance
