Balkinization: Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It

Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It

Neil Netanel

In his new book, The Future of the Internet – and How to Stop It, Oxford University Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation Jonathan Zittrain presents a decidedly dystopic view of the Internet. He also offers a “can do” silver lining (that’s the How to Stop It part). But to my mind, Zittrain’s proposals fall short, leaving his portrait of the Internet’s future darker still.

Zittrain’s book wrestles with the problem of how to maintain the Internet’s “generativity” in the face of growing pressure to make it more tame, regulated, and secure. As Zittrain defines it, “[g]enerativity denotes a technology's overall capacity to produce unprompted change driven by large, varied, and uncoordinated audiences.” A generative technology or social system is an ongoing work-in-progress, one that is sufficiently malleable and open that users and participants can readily employ, build upon, and adapt it to a wide array of different tasks. Generative systems thus enable a large number of people to innovate, collaborate, and express themselves with little or no central coordination and control.

Numerous commentators have exalted in the generativity of the Internet, with its loose, consensus-driven technological underpinning, open end-to-end architecture (treating all digital communication as the same and thus allowing maximum capacity for innovation in application platforms), and welter of web sites, blogs, and other spaces for online communication. Zittrain adds a number of important insights.

First, the Internet’s generativity lies not only in the end-to-end openness of the network but also in the network’s endpoints, the personal computers and other hardware that we use to communicate over the Internet. Virtually all the debate over the Internet’s generativity has centered on the openness of the network (often termed “network neutrality”) and content available on the network (principally, the debate over copyright industries’ use of digital encryption and digital rights management). But as Zittrain cogently argues, the proliferation of personal computers, mobile phones, and other network communication devices that are themselves non-generative -- that sharply constrain users’ ability to adapt and use them outside the device’s predetermined functionality or the supplier’s ongoing control– may greatly diminish the generativity of the system as a whole.

Second, there is nothing inherently generative about network communication or the devices used to communicate. As Zittrain describes in rich detail, the Internet as we know it is a result of happenstance and initial engineering design. Digital communications technology can just as well support closed, proprietary networks, like the old AT&T monopoly phone network and today’s cable television and mobile phone systems. Similarly, computer manufacturers’ decision to sell dumb, general purpose computers and Microsoft’s decision to make Windows an essentially open platform, giving application software developers a wide range to innovate, were not foregone conclusions and are no less important to the Internet’s generativity than is the openness of the network itself.

Third, Internet generativity has become a victim of its own success. The openness of the Internet and personal computers have created a vast communications network that millions of people can use not just to communicate but also to distribute new tools of communication and information manipulation throughout the network. The result has been a continuing outpour of useful innovation, ranging from Internet telephony like Skype to search engines like Google. But by virtue of its open design, the Internet is also increasingly populated with the bad computer code used to propagate spam, computer viruses, spyware, identity theft, and the unwanted collection and dissemination of personal information. These deleterious uses are rapidly undermining the usefulness of Internet accessibility and communication. Zittrain delivers a wake-up call to those wedded to the Internet’s current open architecture and libertarian ethos. Given the Internet’s vulnerability to bad code and evil actors’ willingness to exploit that vulnerability, the status quo is increasingly untenable.

Finally, Zittrain argues, our response to bad code should not be to embrace the security of government regulation or non-generative, limited purpose, closed communication devices, such as mobile phones and PCs that run only manufacturer-controlled software and have no capacity to store new applications (Zittrain calls such devices “appliances”). Both would sharply curtail the Internet’s generativity, with the incumbent costs to widespread innovation and self expression. Rather we need to find ways to use the very decentralized initiative and voluntary social cooperation that underlie generativity to cabin the bad innovations. The solutions that Zittrain proffers are, true to the continually evolving, one-size-does-NOT-fit-all character of generative systems, varied and incomplete. They range from social organization, including relying on a dedicated elite, like Wikipedia’s volunteer administrators, who can block certain self-serving and maliciously erroneous edits to the online encyclopedia, to technical fixes, such as designing PCs to store a complete history of all documents and applications for easy restoring in the event of a virus or crash.

It is often easier to diagnose problems than to come up with workable, effective solutions – and certainly the problems surrounding the Internet are no exception. So it is perhaps not surprising that Zittrain’s proffered remedies are less convincing than his diagnosis. The Wikipedia administrators impose an element of central control over Wikipedia in order to preserve much of its generativity (the ability of any registered user to add or edit entries). That might work for similar projects that feature a dedicated elite of administrators and knowledgeable participants, but it seems ill-suited to address the broader problems that threaten the viability of the Internet – spam, identity theft, and the like. Zittrain seems to agree. He proclaims in the book’s concluding paragraph that Internet generativity actually depends upon millions of users experiencing the Internet as something with which they identify and belong and that they will accordingly actively protect and nurture.

If so, I am pessimistic: I just don’t see an emerging global sea of active, participatory, and technologically savvy Internet citizens coalescing to save the Internet from bad actors. Similarly, the technical fixes that Zittrain proposes all seem to require a level of time and technological sophistication that most Internet users lack: computers divided into safe and experimental virtual PCs, software that shares data about what programs causes problems on other computers (but, I suppose, that somehow keeps that information from those who would use it to cause more problems), tools that enable Internet users to tag the personal data that they put on the Internet to express their privacy preferences about how that data ought to be indexed and used (and hope that others will honor those preferences), and other tools that inform us when others are using data about our online behavior (I’m not sure what would be worse: facing an inbox filled with spam or receiving a constant stream of alerts telling me that I should read about how data of my online behavior is being used).

Zittrain’s book is a must read for those who care – or who should care – about the Internet’s future. But don’t expect to find a happy end of how to stop it.

Posted 3:21 PM by Neil Netanel [link]