Is it selling information or the public commons? Who is minding the store?

Apple’s (News - Alert) commercials are infectious. In no small measure they help drive sales of all things “i” and iOS related.   In fact, Apple has filed to trademark its “There’s An App for That,” tagline. However, just because there is an app does not illuminate that app’s utility or even legality.  This is something to think about given the billions of app downloads and exponentially growing number of apps flooding Apple and Android (News - Alert) app stores. A case in point are the apps to help people find parking spaces in densely populated urban areas.

What’s the issue?

Glad you asked. As anyone who lives in a large city anywhere knows finding on-street free or metered parking more often than not is an urban nightmare. In New York City for example, in residential areas people’s entire lives are (pardon the pun) driven by securing on-street parking and then adjusting to the rules governing hours of legal use. This can include hiring people to move your car in the middle of the work day to avoid towing. 

Not surprisingly apps have sprung up, leveraging location and presence information to “help” the forlorn. Examples include:

• Parking Panda – a Baltimore based real-time parking discovery tool that enables owners of private parking spaces to rent out underutilized spaces to a community of drivers.  
• SpotSwitch – in beta in New York City helps drivers search for a parking spot nearest to where they wish to be which brings up a map of parking spots and allows users to notify other community members when they are leaving their spot.
• Packing Auction – with proposed launch date of August 1 in New York City, it takes the SpotSwitch idea one step further by creating an auction, ala eBay, for people vacating spaces to be matched up with those circling neighborhoods looking for them.

The Parking Panda idea, allowing private property owners to earn a little extra cash, makes sense. I used to cruise Gainesville, FL looking for a place to park near the University of Florida football stadium for home games.  I did so on weekends when the city’s population increased from 125,000 to roughly 300,000 (yes the stadium only holds 91,000), and in an area where parking on a normal day was a challenge. This would have been a godsend, including the ability to reserve a space and pay for it on my mobile.

SpotSwitch is a bit more interesting since it is dealing with public property, but it appears you still have to get to a nearby space before someone else or rely on the kindness of others, and really or you are getting is a head’s up. 

Parking Auction, however, has raised eyebrows and hackles in New York City. In an interview on radio station WCBS, Parking Auction founder Brian Rosetti was asked by reporter Alex Silverman if auctioning off public parking spaces was legal. His response was, “Sure. I mean, you’re not actually selling the spot. I mean, you’re selling information…So, we’re creating a market in information that a parking spot is about to become available. A logistics company selling information, whether it’s about the fastest route to take, isn’t really selling the road.”

That rationale is frightening.   (Note: as of this writing the New York City Department of Transportation is taking a look at the legality issues raised by this interpretation). However, it should give us all pause. 

By extension, anyplace I choose to temporarily occupy on the public commons can be turned into a temporary ability for me to sell something we all paid for to someone else just by claiming all I am doing is selling information. This idea is bad enough in the physical world for things like park benches, prime locations at the beach on a hot day, etc. But what happens in the virtual world? Talk about perverting and then standing on its head the entire notion of “net neutrality.” 

It is bad enough we have the tawdry practice of squatting on designer telephone numbers and URLs (for malice and protection against its possibility) has become standard operating procedure.  What about selling my Tweets, Facebook (News - Alert) comments and photos, and identity? The fine print may say one thing, but who is to say someone does not go over-the-top (OTT) on today’s OTTs? I suspect, given five minutes anyone reading this could construct a top 10 list of public things they would not like to see auctioned off by opportunists.

The legality of selling off access to and use of the public commons is something to be tested and re-tested for years in the courts. The dynamic areas of digital rights management (DRM) and real-time status (location and presence) beckon. In the meantime, there is a major question that has nothing to do with finding/buying a parking space on a public thoroughfare, i.e., who is minding the store? 

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Peter Bernstein is a technology industry veteran, having worked in multiple capacities with several of the industry's biggest brands, including Avaya (News - Alert), Alcatel-Lucent, Telcordia, HP, Siemens, Nortel, France Telecom, and others, and having served on the Advisory Boards of 15 technology startups. To read more of Peter's work, please visit his columnist page.