The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It

by Jonathan Zittrain
Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008
343 pp., illus. 6 b/w. Trade, $30.00
ISBN: 978-0-300-12487-3.

Reviewed by John F. Barber
Digital Technology and Culture
Washington State University Vancouver

jfbarber@eaze.net

The extraordinary success of the Internet results from its ability to provide wide-ranging content through multiple avenues of access. Examples of this success include eBay and its online auctions, Craig's list and its online classified advertising, free web-based email, hosting services for personal web pages, instant message software and services, social networking web sites, and search engines. All emerged from niche interests, user innovation, and the openness of consumer personal computers to accept outside code. The result, sponsored by venture capital, is a vibrant set of tools that have furthered the community minded ethos of the Internet.

This generative ability is, however, under threat as more and more users unwittingly facilitate unsettling new kinds of control and lockdown of innovation.

As Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University and co-founder of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, argues in The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It, the "generativity" of the Internet, the ability for anyone, anywhere to build on it, is threatened by tethered appliances and applications.

Zittrain cites iPods, Xboxes, TiVos, and other locked down computers the first-wave of Internet-centered products that cannot be easily modified by their users. Such "tethered appliances" are made to be modified only by their vendors or selected partners and are already being used in little-known ways. As examples, Zittrain notes the reconfiguration of automobile GPS systems to eavesdrop on occupants and digital video recorders that can be ordered to self-destruct from thousands of miles away. Zittrain also notes that mash-up applications like Google and Facebook can be monitored from central sources, and their contents eliminated.

The generative ability of the Internet is at risk, Zittrain concludes, and the Internet's current trajectory is one of lost opportunity, especially if the market continues to abandon or lock down the customizable personal computer and application software that have served so well in the past.

The solutions, Zittrain says, rest on social, legal, and technological innovation. As a touchstone, Zittrain cites Wikipedia, a technology that allows anyone to edit its content, but simultaneously allows for quick restoration of bad edits. Vandalism, lies, and copyright infringement are solved through community processes that have impact. Similarly, in the absence of legal intervention, grassroots, peer-produced-and-implemented responses to security threats at the Internet's technical layer facilitate choice by end users regarding what software to run, or with whom to communicate.

To further such efforts, Zittrain calls for a series of conversations, arguments, and experiments between network engineers, software designers, expert users, and those who simply want their personal computers to provide useful functions, all outside traditional markets, using multiple models and motivations, and then carried to ubiquity by commercial forces.

Specific suggestions include maintaining data portability, maintaining network neutrality and generativity for interface, software, and hardware choices, and maintaining user privacy. Zittrain works through the competing claims of the debate surrounding both sides of each issue. Additionally, Zittrain calls for attention to overlapping claims to intellectual property that make it difficult for individuals creating new but not completely original creative works to avoid copyright infringement. As Zittrain argues, content produced by citizens who cannot easily obtain permissions for its ingredients will be squeezed out of the Internet.

In conclusion, Zittrain argues for a generative device (he uses the XO computer developed by the One Laptop Per Child project as an example) in the hands of millions of users, connected to a neutral Internet. Rather than locked down appliances, such computer devices would make their users feel as if they were connected to something with which they could identify and belong. The generativity of such an Internet would engage its constituency who would then protect and nourish it. This constituency would consist of users and designers who see Internet content as more than simply something produced by someone else and provided through a iPhone or TiVo.