Archive for May 28th, 2008

Jonathan Zittrain, the co-founder of the Berkman Center and professor at Oxford University, has a new book entitled “The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It” in which he solidifies himself as one of the leading thinkers in Internet studies.

JZ provides a simple framework for understanding digital technologies whose implications are profound. For JZ, what make the Internet (and to a lesser extend, other technologies) great is its ‘generative’ nature. “Generativity is a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.” The generative nature of the net has enabled a whole new era of innovation spawning Google, Wikipedia, YouTube and more. However, with these welcome advances has come another effect of generativity – badware. The generative state of the net also allows malicious exploits like spam, viruses and spyware.

These massive enterprises pose an existential threat to the Internet as it has functioned and prospered thus far. As a result, a new form of digital devices and networks have arisen. JZ calls these sterile and TiVo, most cell phones and other locked down devices are prime examples. A middle ground is exemplified by the iPhone whose SDK provides a form of “contingent generativity” – you can generate new innovations as long as Steve Jobs approves. The rise of intermediaries is something about which I have written before.

What Zittrain has done in The Future of the Internet is fire a warning shot past the bow of all the tech geeks who relish their TiVos and iPhones. He openly admits that these devices are wonderful accomplishments of technology and design, but the book forces the reader to come to grips with the ideological and practical implications of these “safe devices.”

The implications are manifold and often unwelcome. Sterile devices tend to make innovation more difficult as freedom is limited. Wikipedia would not have taken off and have millions of articles in a model of control. In fact, its predecessor, Nupedia, was a failed attempt at controlled encyclopedia creation.

Contingency provides government or other would-be oppressors an easy means to surveil or censor. Through his work with the OpenNet Initiative JZ has studied the dozens of nations who actively censor the Internet, in effect making the generative network a sterile one. Similarly, the shift to cloud computing or software as a service means that data centers are controlling huge amounts of other people’s businesses and have the ability to stop things they would prefer not occur or are more easily open to regulations which may stifle creativity.

The obvious and easy answer that governments, corporations and users are embracing to avoid the many negative effects of generativity (badware) is the shift to sterility. However, JZ thinks a more norm-based approach will be able to save the benefits of generativity while vastly limiting the downsides. A prime example is robots.txt, an optional but widely accepted standard which allows people to not be included in search engines. Google and Yahoo have no compulsion to follow webmasters’ requests, but they do. Likewise, Wikipedians by and large seek consensus and a neutral point of view, even though they are free to not do so. JZ’s plea is for “netizens” to vote with their processors and bandwidth for solutions which embrace the ethos of generativity. The Berkman Center’s StopBadware.org is an example and has worked with Google to stop people visiting websites known for disseminating dangerous code.