Taming the Consumer's Computer

Last month the top executives of two of the most powerful media companies in the world traveled to Washington to testify before Congress about the most dangerous threat they face: the American consumer.

Of course they didn't quite phrase it that way. Michael Eisner, chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, complained that the technology industry made it too easy for ''people wanting to get anything for free on their television or computer or hand-held device.'' Peter Chernin, president of the News Corporation, worried that the Internet's ''ability to empower the general public'' would lead to the online theft of some of the contents of media companies' digital treasuries.

Both men want the next generation of personal computers to be unable to deliver unauthorized movies, music and other content, and they asked that Congress stand ready to intervene if industry failed to deliver the necessary technology to safeguard its products. A lone executive, from Intel, objected. The market, he said, not Congress, should dictate how technology works.

The debate on Capitol Hill between content providers like Disney and those who make the products to deliver that content, like Intel, was really a proxy for a much larger debate: What do we want our technology to do? How do we want it to work? And do we have any say in the matter?

For most forms of current technology, these questions have long been settled. No executives are worried about illegal uses of televisions or coffee makers, for instance, and no consumers need to worry that these appliances will crash or become infected with viruses -- and we would never accept it if they did. Our TV's and VCR's don't take ill when we watch infected programs, and our refrigerators never require rebooting.

Yet we have come to tolerate such problems from our personal computers. The PC's fundamental and unique unreliability flows from its construction as a so-called flexible platform -- a mere staging area for many kinds of software. The point (and bane) of a PC is, essentially, to run whatever software it encounters.