The iPhone Turns Five

[Commentary] On June 29, 2007, thousands of fan-boys and -girls camped in long lines to inhale a wisp of sweet techno fairy dust. The new iPhone rocked the world. Revolutionary in design, function and ecosystem, it set off the mobile data tsunami. In three days, Apple sold a million of them.

The iconic innovation of the Information Age, however, inspired a fierce counterattack. Columbia University Law Prof. Tim Wu condemned the iPhone business model as "iPhony." The handset was cool, he said, but the business model tied the customer to AT&T's wireless network (where Apple struck a four-year exclusive deal) and to iTunes (Apple's content store). Soon the Apple App Store would deepen the master-slave relationship. This supposedly condemned users. "The closed iPhone," wrote Prof. Wu, "stands in contrast to the open-platform design that has been the bedrock of both the personal computer and Internet revolutions. . . . Once Big Brother's foe, [Apple is] now more like Little Brother, happy to sell cute little devices that are easy to use, make money, and spread false consciousness."

Are you kidding me? The magic is not in a particular model but in the dynamics of platform competition. Shouting out "open" or "closed" as a prescription for categorical success is at best a mirage and at worst a predicate for anticonsumer public policy, like the government's long antitrust crusade against Microsoft.

[Hazlett is a professor of law and economics at George Mason University]