The Future of the Internet, by Jonathan Zittrain

The full title of cyberlaw scholar Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It is stencilled across yellow and black warning stripes. The message is clear: something terrible is going to happen - unless...

Whoever pitched this book is trying too hard. It is by no means an easy read, rather a fascinating exploration of the internet, bringing together sociological insights with business history, and set in a framework of a fast moving and elusive legal structure. OK, he does say that if we all go on like this it will all end in tears but Zittrain's is not a hand-wringing, why-oh-why condemnation, rather a highly intelligent analysis of a digital world stretched seemingly to breaking point by the tensions between creative, open collaboration and closed but efficient business models.

The essential conflict is between what Zittrain terms generative platforms which can be reprogrammed and repurposed by almost anyone and tethered appliances that pretty much controlled by the manufacturer. It's the difference between a PC and TiVo or a toaster. PCs were designed to run software written by other people unlike appliances which are tied to (tethered) and ultimately controlled by the supplier.

A similar pattern emerged when the internet took off. Some prioviders, such as CompuServe tried a walled garden approach, but the infinite flexibility and range of possibilities offered by the Net hugely outpaced the creative endeavour of controlling proprietary networks.

Initially at least, this generative creativity was good - until people began relasing bad code, either from folly, carelessness or less forgivable motives.

"Generative sources are built on the notion that they are never fully complete, that they have many usages yet to be conceived of and that the public can be trusted to invent and share good uses." So far so good, but "generativity also brings a capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences." People do bad things.

Viruses, trojans, worms, surveillance programmes and identity theft are part of online life; mobile phones and sat-navs can be remotely controlled to eavesdrop on conversations and track our movements. Computers atre not necessarily our friends - and, especially when they are networked, the potential threats are mushrooming.

One way forward is increasingly to opt for tethered appliances that pretty much do what they set out to do and can't be reconfigured by the average owner. In effect they are rented rather than owned, but this puts a huge power into the hands of the manufacturer who can withdraw or reprogramme applicances at any time. Zittrain suggest a scenario whereby Kodak owned the rights and uses to pictures taken on its cameras - few consumers would go for this, but most of us keep increasingly large amounts of personal and business information on external netwroks rather than on our own computer.

The implications for this abrogation of control have enormous implications for personal privacy, and Zittrain's chapter on Privacy 2.0 is a must-read.

Google mail trawling personal emails to help target advertising is one thing, but can we be comfortable as it becomes possible to configure use image recognition technology that processes tagged photos on Facebook and Flickr to automatically label label all future images of that individual. Zittrain speculates plausibly about the impact of mashups using such techniques to instantly cross reference people emerging from a clinic or taking part in a  demonstration.

"Public" and "private" are increasingly becoming blured and vague terms that lack the subtlty to describe our new world. As Zittrain observes: "For privacy the public is variously creator, beneficiary and victim of this free-for-all."

"As people put data on the internet for others to use or re-use - data that might be about other people, as well as themselves - there are no tools to allow those who provide the data to express preferences about how the data ought to be indexed or used." As he warns, even those who are equipped to make rational decisions about sharing personal information in the short-term might underestimate what might happen in the futire as it is re-used and repurposed.

Sometimes Zittrain writes like a lawyer and he is certainly not afraid to make the reader do the work, but this a powerful book which I will return to again and again. Read it!

Comments

[Rob]

Hi Phil

Not sure if you caught it, but he presented a paper at the Guardian's "Future of Journalism" conference last week. I've included a link to the mp3 with the post.

There are definitely some interesting ideas being kicked about here and I'll be using a number of them in MAC301 next term. You can also download a .pdf of his book from its website. Handy for the students I think.

[Brisbane marketing consultant]

Thanks for the review. I think the worst aspects of the Internet have already past us.

Most users are a lot more sophisticated than 5 years ago and are aware of the potential dangers. Banks and ISPs are getting smarter with spam filtering and user verification and people are using the Internet more to get information about threats.