Archive for the ‘Symposium (Future of Internet)’ Category

Future of the Internet Symposium: (Im)Perfect Enforcement

posted by Ryan Calo

Prohibition wasn’t working. President Hoover assembled the Wickersham Commission to investigate why. The Commission concluded that despite an historic enforcement effort—including the police abuses that made the Wickersham Commission famous—the government could not stop everyone from drinking. Many people, especially in certain city neighborhoods, simply would not comply. The Commission did not recommend repeal at this time, but by 1931 it was just around the corner.

Five years later an American doctor working in a chemical plant made a startling discovery. Several workers began complaining that alcohol was making them sick, causing most to stop drinking it entirely—“involuntary abstainers,” as the doctor, E.E. Williams, later put it. It turns out they were in contact with a chemical called disulfiram used in the production of rubber. Disulfiram is well-tolerated and water-soluble. Today, it is marketed as the popular anti-alcoholism drug Antabuse.

Were disulfiram discovered just a few years earlier, would federal law enforcement have dumped it into key parts of the Chicago or Los Angeles water supply to stamp out drinking for good? Probably not. It simply would not have occurred to them. No one was regulating by architecture then. To dramatize this point: when New York City decided twenty years later to end a string of garbage can thefts by bolting the cans to the sidewalk, the decision made the front page of the New York Times. The headline read: “City Bolts Trash Baskets To Walks To End Long Wave Of Thefts.”

In an important but less discussed chapter in The Future of the Internet, Jonathan Zittrain explores our growing taste and capacity for “perfect enforcement.” Read the rest of this post »

  September 7, 2010 at 2:58 pm   Posted in: Architecture, Articles and Books, Book Reviews, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, DRM, Jurisprudence, Legal Theory, Symposium (Future of Internet), Technology   Print This Post   5 Comments

Future of the Internet Symposium: Lessons in Designing for Privacy

posted by Betsy Masiello

  September 7, 2010 at 12:01 pm   Posted in: Privacy, Symposium (Future of Internet), Uncategorized   Print This Post   2 Comments

Future of the Internet Symposium: The Role of Infrastructure Management in Determining Internet Freedom

posted by admin

Last week, Facebook reportedly blocked users of Apple’s new Ping social networking service from reaching Facebook friends because the company was concerned about the prospect of massive amounts of traffic inundating its servers.  This is precisely the type of architectural lockdown Jonathan Zittrain brilliantly portends in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Contemplating this service blockage and re-reading Jonathan’s book this weekend have me thinking about the role of private industry infrastructure management in shaping Internet freedom.

The Privatization of Internet Governance

I’m heading to the United Nations Internet Governance Forum in Vilnius, Lithuania, where I will be speaking on a panel with Vinton Cerf and members of the Youth Coalition on Internet Governance about “Core Internet Values and the Principles of Internet Governance Across Generations.” What role will “infrastructure management” values increasingly play as a private industry ordering of the flow of information on the Internet? The privatization of Internet governance is an area that has not received enough attention.  Internet scholars are often focused on content.  Internet governance debates often reduce into an exaggerated dichotomy, as Milton Mueller describes it, between the extremes of cyberlibertarianism and cyberconservativism. The former can resemble utopian technological determinism and the later is basically a state sovereignty model that wants to extend traditional forms of state control to the Internet.

The cyberlibertarian and cyberconservative perspectives are indistinguishable in that they both tend to disregard the infrastructure governance sinews already permeating the Internet’s technical architecture.  There is also too much attention to institutional governance battles and to the Internet Governance Forum itself, which is, in my opinion, a red herring because it has no policy-making authority and fails to address important controversies.

Where there is attention to the role of private sector network management and traffic shaping, much analysis has focused on “last mile” issues of interconnection rather than the Internet’s backbone architecture.  Network neutrality debates are a prime example of this.  Another genre of policy attention addresses corporate social responsibility at the content level, such as the Facebook Beacon controversy and the criticism Google initially took for complying with government requests to delete politically sensitive YouTube videos and filter content. These are critical issues, but equally important and less visible decisions occur at the architectural level of infrastructure management.  I’d like to briefly mention two examples of private sector infrastructure management functions that also have implications for Internet freedom and innovation: private sector Internet backbone peering agreements and the use of deep packet inspection for network management.

Private Sector Internet Backbone Peering Agreements

For the Internet to successfully operate, Internet backbones obviously must connect with one another.  These backbone networks are owned and operated primarily by private telecommunications companies such as British Telecom, Korea Telecom, Verizon, AT&T, Internet Initiative Japan and Comcast.  Independent commercial networks conjoin either at private Internet connection points between two companies or at multi-party Internet exchange points (IXPs).

IXPs are the physical junctures where different companies’ backbone trunks interconnect and exchange Internet packets and route them toward their appropriate destinations.  One of the largest IXPs (based on throughput of peak traffic) is the Deutscher Commercial Internet Exchange (DE-CIX) in Frankfurt, Germany.  This IXP connects hundreds of Internet providers, including content delivery networks and web hosting services as well as Internet service providers.  Google, Sprint, Level3, and Yahoo all connect through DE-CIX, as well as to many other IXPs.

Other interconnection points involve private contractual arrangements between two telecommunications companies to connect for the purpose of exchanging Internet traffic. Making this connection at private interconnection points requires physical interconnectivity and equipment but it also involves agreements about cost, responsibilities, and performance. There are generally two types of agreements – peering agreements and transit agreements. Peering agreements refer to mutually beneficial arrangements whereby no money is exchanged among companies agreeing to exchange traffic at interconnection points.  In a transit agreement, one telecommunications company agrees to pay a backbone provider for interconnection. There is no standard approach for the actual agreement to peer or transit, with some interconnections involving formal contracts and others based upon verbal agreements between companies’ technical personnel.

Interconnection agreements are an unseen regime.  They have few directly relevant statutes, almost no regulatory oversight, and little transparency in private contracts and agreements.  Yet these interconnection points have important economic and implications to the future of the Internet.  They certainly have critical infrastructure implications depending on whether they provide sufficient redundancy, capacity and security.  Disputes over peering and transit agreements, not just problems with physical architecture, have created network outages in the past.  The effect on free market competition is another concern, related to possible lack of competition in Internet backbones, dominance by a small number of companies, and peering agreements among large providers that could be detrimental to potential competitors. Global interconnection disputes have been numerous and developing countries have complained about transit costs to connect to dominant backbone providers.  The area of interconnection patents is another emerging concern with implications to innovation.  Interconnection points are also obvious potential points of government filtering and censorship.  Because of the possible implications to innovation and freedom, greater transparency and insight into the arrangements and configurations at these sites would be very helpful.

Network Management via Deep Packet Inspection

Another infrastructure management technique with implications to the future of the Internet is the use of deep packet inspection (DPI) for network management traffic shaping.  DPI is a capability manufactured into network devices (e.g. firewalls) that scrutinizes the entire contents of a packet, including the payload as well as the packet header.  This payload is the actual information content of the packet.  The bulk of Internet traffic is information payload, versus the small amount of administrative and routing information contained within packet headers.  ISPs and other information intermediaries have traditionally used packet headers to route packets, perform statistical analysis, and perform routine network management and traffic optimization.  Until recent years, it has not been technically viable to inspect the actual content of packets because of the enormous processing speeds and computing resources necessary to perform this function.

The most publicized instances of DPI have involved the ad-serving practices of service providers wishing to provide highly targeted marketing based on what a customer views or does on the Internet.  Other attention to DPI focuses on concerns about state use of deep packet inspection for Internet censorship. One of the originally intended uses of DPI, and still an important use, is for network security. DPI can help identify viruses, worms, and other unwanted programs embedded within legitimate information and help prevent denial of service attacks. What will be the implications of increasingly using DPI for network management functions, legitimately concerned with network performance, latency, and other important technical criterion?

Zittrain discusses how the value of trust was designed into the Internet’s original architecture.  The new reality is that the end-to-end architectural principle historically imbued in Internet design has waned considerably over the years with the introduction of Network Address Translation (NATs), firewalls, and other networks intermediaries. Deep packet inspection capability, engineered into routers, will further erode the end-to-end principle, an architectural development which will have implications to the future of the Internet’s architecture as well as to the future of individual privacy and network neutrality.

As I head to the Internet Governance Forum in Vilnius, Lithuania, Zittrain’s book is a reminder of what is at stake at the intersection of technical expediency and Internet freedom and how private ordering, rather than governments or new Internet governance institutions, will continue to shape the future of the Internet.

  September 7, 2010 at 11:11 am   Posted in: Architecture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Politics, Privacy, Social Network Websites, Symposium (Future of Internet), Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   3 Comments

Net neutrality: the FCC takes back the ball

posted by Jonathan Zittrain

There’s some movement in the U.S. network neutrality debates under a rather dry heading: “Further Inquiry Into Two Under-Developed Issues in the Open Internet Proceeding.”

So far: a couple weeks ago Google and Verizon announced a “legislative framework proposal” to “preserve the open Internet and the vibrant and innovative markets it supports, to protect consumers, and to promote continued investment in broadband access,”  blogged here.  The proposal emerged in the vacuum created by a Federal court ruling overturning the FCC’s regulation of Comcast’s throttling of peer-to-peer traffic, and it was criticized harshly by a number of open Internet advocates as an undue boon to the network providers’ interests.

Now the FCC has re-entered the picture with its September “further inquiry,” and done so with a deft touch.  First, by seeking additional comments, the document makes it clear that its “NPRM” — a proceeding to craft rules to promote an open Internet that many thought the Comcast decision had derailed — is still alive.  Exactly how any rules will be made is not discussed; instead, the FCC notes the areas where consensus has been reached: some conception of net neutrality is a good idea, at least on non-wireless platforms; that network practices should be disclosed; that net neurality shouldn’t preclude reasonable network management practices by ISPs; and that case-by-case, flexible adjudication beats lengthy and complex rules.

That’s an astute move: to the extent that the Google/Verizon document represented horse trading — “I’ll agree that net neutrality should apply to wired networks if you agree that it’s too soon to talk about rules for wireless” — the FCC has moved rhetorically to lock in the parts of the deal that most embrace an open Internet by pointing out that there’s now consensus on those points.

That leaves the most controversial parts of the agreement as objects for further inquiry, and it’s where the FCC is looking for more public comments.  These “under-developed issues” are on the confusing “specialized services” and the less confusing (but no less challenged) wireless proposed exemptions (or at least temporary relief) from net neutrality rules.

There, the FCC offers a lucid and measured summary of the state of play on each issue, along with some initial thoughts on ways to resolve each, drawing from among the many comments already received from industry and public interest participants.  For specialized services, there’s the question of what happens when a network provider wants to use the pipe it has into someone’s house or business for something independent of vanilla Internet broadband.  There are legacy examples of this: the same wires that carry a phone company’s Internet DSL service carry regular old telephone service, too; and the same cable company coax that carries broadband also carries cable TV.  Indeed, those “specialized” services used to be the main ones, with the Internet as the afterthought.

It would be strange to say that the same net neutrality principles that mean Comcast can’t favor access to cnn.com over foxnews.com also ought to mean that Comcast can’t favor MTV over Animal Planet in basic cable.  Basic cable is Comcast’s to fill as it pleases, conducting all sorts of deals to figure out whether a new channel should be cute cats or pay-per-view boxing.  (To be sure, this is with the exception of the byzantine and ill-considered “must carry” rules that give legacy TV broadcasters a chance to demand a corresponding cable channel without having to negotiate a deal for it — while also allowing those broadcasters to refuse to allow the cable company to carry the channels unless they cut a deal.  That’s Congress’s mess, though, not the FCC’s.)

So the strongest view against specialized services might be: OK, network providers, maybe you keep your legacy specialized services, but other than that, we want you to use your bandwidth for open Internet.  But then one could see new specialized services shoehorned in via one’s telephone (“Look, a new handset with a screen to plug into the regular phone line!”) or cable (“A new channel called the Best of YouTube, with fast forward, rewind, and favorite buttons on my cable remote!”).  The puzzle is: if we want to give those legacy modalities a chance to freshen up, or even contemplate new kinds of specialized services not anchored in the old ones, can we do it without the prospect of diminishing the open Internet that’s currently so popular over those very wires?  The Internet tail stands to wag the telco/cable/TV dog to which it was first attached; how to mediate between them now, if at all, should the dog (and its more proprietary frame) stage a comeback?

Check out pp. 2-4 of the FCC’s document for its own view of the issue, along with some approaches that could help situate specialized services without simply banning them.  I’m intrigued with the idea of guaranteed capacity for regular Internet service — in other words, new specialized services should not be used to shrink the pie for regular Internet offerings.  Experimentation could continue apace on the open Internet, with some of its best results then bottled up and offered sleekly through a more appliancized offering.  So long as there’s still general public access to and broad usage of the regular Internet, a hybrid ecosystem could offer the best of both worlds.  In a way, it’s preferable to have generative and “sterile” environments side-by-side than to have generative environments compete with “contingently generative” ones.  The latter is like the case of the iPhone — to a developer, it acts just like the open PC environment, where anyone can code for it and reach consumers, until it doesn’t — Apple bans a particular app or changes its rules after achieving huge market share.

And speaking of mobile smartphones, there’s then the question of wireless.  Some net neutrality advocates might ask: what question, saying that it should be treated the same as everything else — as Internet protocols intended.  Others, most directly the wireless carriers themselves, say that nondiscrimination rules will constrain their investment in building out the more nascent wireless infrastructure.  Again the FCC lays out some options, and for the first time that I’ve seen, asks the question not only of net neutrality for use of wireless bandwidth, but app neutrality for developers’ access to a smartphone platform’s app store.  The Future of the Internet has my own views on that question, and the FCC neatly asks if perhaps rules on one could help justify an absence of rules on the other: maybe app neutrality would make us worry less about network discrimination, or net neutrality could still permit app discrimination.

Despite the nondescript eponymous title that suggests that it’s just another abstruse government document, the FCC’s further inquiry is worth a read.  And its contents signal that regulators can be reassuringly versed in the topics they’ve taken up, even as their power to regulate remains in question.  There are still some moves the FCC could make to create net neutrality rules in the absence of a new statute, and without mentioning (much less taking) them, the invitation to comment is one the major parties to the debate won’t ignore.

  September 7, 2010 at 11:02 am   Posted in: Symposium (Future of Internet), Technology   Print This Post   One Comment

Has the Future of the Internet happened?

posted by Jonathan Zittrain

I wrote the Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It, and its precursor law review article the Generative Internet, between 2004 and 2007. I wanted to capture a sense of just how bizarre the Internet — and the PC environment — were.  How much the values and assumptions of, metaphorically, dot-org and dot-edu, rather than just dot-com, were built into the protocols of the Internet and the architecture of the PC.  The amateur, hobbyist, backwater origins of the Internet and the PC were crucial to their success against more traditional counterparts, but also set the stage for a new host of problems as they became more popular.

The designers and makers of the Internet and PC platforms did not expect to come up with the applications for each — they figured unknown others would do that.  So, unlike CompuServe, AOL, or Prodigy, the Internet didn’t have a main menu.  And once for-profit ISPs started rolling the Internet out to anyone willing to subscribe, there came to be a critical mass of eyeballs ready to experience varieties of content and services — the providers of which didn’t have to negotiate a business deal with some Internet Overseer the way they did for CompuServe et al.  Some content and services could be paid for, at least as soon as credit cards could function cheaply online, and other could be free — either because of a separate business model like advertising, or because the provider didn’t feel inclined to monetize visiting eyeballs.  Tim Berners-Lee could invent the World Wide Web and have it run as just another application, seeking neither a patent on its workings nor an architecture for it that placed him in a position of control.  Today, of course, the Web is so ubiquitous that people often confuse it with the Internet itself.

When bad apples emerge on an unmediated platform — and they do as soon as there are enough people using it to make it worth it to subvert it — it can be difficult to deal with them.  If someone spams you on Facebook, the first step is to make it a customer service issue — complain to Facebook, and they can discipline the account.  If someone spams you on email, it’s much trickier, because there’s no Email Manager — just lots of email servers, some big, some little, and many of them with accounts hacked by others.  That’s one reason why a newer generation of Internet users prefers Facebook or Twitter messaging to old fashioned email.  Same for the PC itself: with no PC Manager, there’s no easy way to get help or exact justice when exposed to malware.  I worried that malware in particular, and cybersecurity in general, would be a fulcrum point in pushing “regular” people away from the happenstance of generative platforms designed by nerds who figured they could worry about security later.  Hence a migration to less generative platforms managed like services rather than products.

I understand and sympathize with that migration.  But it’s important to recognize its downsides — particularly if one is among the libertarian set, which has been comprised some of the most vocal critics of the Future of the Internet.  Whether software developer or user, volunteering control over one’s digital environment to a Manager means that the manager can change one’s experience at any time — or worse, be compelled to by outside pressures.  I write about this prospect at length here.  The famously ungovernable Internet suddenly becomes much more governable, an outcome most libertarian types would be concerned about.  Many Internet freedom proponents aren’t willing to argue for or trust those freedoms to a “mere” political process; they prefer to see them de facto guaranteed by a computing environment largely immune to regulation. Read the rest of this post »

  September 7, 2010 at 9:00 am   Posted in: Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, DRM, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Symposium (Future of Internet), Technology, Web 2.0, Wiki   Print This Post   One Comment

Future of the Internet Symposium: The Roles of Technology and Economics

posted by Steven Bellovin

I’m delighted to have this opportunity to participate in this symposium.  I’m a computer scientist, not a law professor; most of my comments will tend to be at the intersection of technology and public policy.

When reading Jonathan Zittrain’s book — and I agree with his overall thesis about generativity — it’s important to take into account what was technically and economically possible at various times.  Things that are obvious in retrospect may have been obvious way back when, too, but the technology didn’t exist to do them in any affordable fashion.  While I feel that there are a number of sometimes-serious historical errors in the early part of the book — for example, AT&T, even as a monopoly, not just leased modems but also modified its core network to support them; data networking was not solely a post-Carterphone phenomenon — the more serious problems stem from ignoring this perspective.  I’ll focus on one case in point: the alleged IBM control of mainframes.

Read the rest of this post »

  September 6, 2010 at 11:15 pm   Posted in: Symposium (Future of Internet), Technology, Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments

Future of the Internet Symposium: What if We’re Innovating Our Way to Panopticons & Poverty?

posted by Frank Pasquale

Jonathan Zittrain is a leading theorist of internet governance. This field has primarily been concerned with promoting innovation. In my view, Zittrain’s greatest contribution to the field has been his willingness to take seriously the types of privacy, security, and fairness concerns raised by new networks and data analysis.

For example, other internet theorists have been quick to draw a bright line between Silicon Valley “good guys” and the dark forces of telecom, cable, Hollywood, and RIAA lobbyists who’d shut them down. Zittrain has never gone in for such naive dichotomies. It’s no surprise that he’s offered thoughtful commentary on the recent Google-Verizon proposal on net neutrality. I’m sure he’ll continue to a be an excellent guide to future developments as social networks, search engines, carriers, and content owners engage in “co-opetition” to extract maximum revenues from customers.

But at some point, even the most thoughtful mediators between the academic, regulatory, and business worlds must reconsider whether the current innovation game is worth the candle of ongoing privacy violations, industrial concentration, black box technology, and cozy relationships between Silicon Valley and DC elites. If the next “garage innovators” dream of building a new web utility so they can grab a billion dollars and destroy user privacy—who really cares? Ivan Seidenberg may well be as good a CEO for the “next Facebook” as a would-be Mark Zuckerberg.
Read the rest of this post »

  September 6, 2010 at 10:52 pm   Posted in: Symposium (Future of Internet), Technology   Print This Post   2 Comments

Future of the Internet Symposium: Re-Intermediation

posted by Harry Lewis

I am happy to start the blog-a-thon in which a number of us are taking up topics related to Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, a masterful analysis of the forces at work to control the Internet. I am moved to take up the topic of CDA Section 230, that friend of bloggers and newspaper web sites which protects them from legal liability for stuff that other people post. As Zittrain says on page 195, “No one fully owns today’s problems of copyright infringement and defamation online”–and, he might have said, the problem of web-facilitated crime more generally. “But,” he continues, “the solution is not to conscript intermediaries to become the Net police.”

The Internet disintermediates. It breaks the grip of the middlemen we used to rely on for a variety of services. I don’t need a publisher for my ruminations about the digital world; I can self-publish on my blog. I don’t need a travel agent, or a stock broker; I can make my own travel reservations and buy my own stock picks. Whether I do a better job now at these tasks than I used to have done for me, and who is getting the financial benefit of my doing the work that I used to hire someone to do for me, are nice questions, but the power shift is the important thing.

Which brings us to the interesting story of Craigslist and its Adult Services (née Erotic) section. After a horrible murder here in Boston in which a woman was killed after setting up shop in a hotel and receiving paying visitors there, Martha Coakley of MA, Richard Blumenthal of NY, and a number of other Attorneys General started pressuring Craigslist to remove the Adult category. This weekend, Craigslist did exactly that, replacing it with the word CENSORED. (Only in the U.S.) The AGs had, in essence, cast Craigslist in the role of an intermediary capable of policing the disintermediated commerce it was enabling.

A number of good stories appeared about this. I thought the Boston Globe had the money quote, from Harvey Silverglate, a noted defense attorney and civil libertarian. “They do not have the legal power [to shut down adult services on the site], so instead they’re abusing their office by intimidating private citizens,’’ he said. ’’I think it’s cowardly.’’ David Fahrenthold of theWashington Post got a good quote from Blumenthal, who may have a hard time remembering his athletic career at Harvard, but sure knows right from wrong. “They lack either the will or the wherewithal to effectively screen for prostitution ads. Which is why we [said] to them, ‘Shut down the site.’” (Fahrenthold also quotes Zittrain. Full disclosure: David Fahrenthold is my son-in-law.)

What is going on here is CDA Section 230 in action. “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” The same law that protects the Globe and the Post if one of their online commenters says something libelous also protects Craigslist. As law professor M. Ryan Calo told the New York Times, “What’s happened here is the states’ attorneys general, having failed to win in court and in litigation, have decided to revisit this in the court of public opinion, and in the court of public opinion, they have been much more successful.”

I have a question for the Attorneys General: Why don’t they go after the prostitutes for prostitution, rather than, lacking any legal basis to go after the web site on which they advertise, bullying the site? It’s not like the prostitutes are hard to find. Have one of your gumshoes answer the ads and make a few arrests. Not rocket science–and also not headline stuff, I suppose. No election bounce for arresting women you are simultaneously portraying as victims. But before you start lobbying Congress to change the law about what people can say online, why not make some arrests for the act you are actually supposed to be worried about and which already is a crime? You are being paid to enforce the laws that exist, not the laws you wish existed but don’t, or even the laws your constituents wish existed.

The story of the day on this issue is in Boston’s “other” newspaper, the Boston Herald, whose reporters seem to have no law professors in their little black books but do have some other professional contacts. “Hub Escort Service Cheers Craigslist Ad Shutdown,” reads the headline. “With Craigslist, there’s no middleman,” says the madam, who expects her business to surge if it becomes harder for willing customers and willing service providers to connect to each other directly. Now there is a businesswoman who understands the Internet. This story isn’t over yet — some of those adult ads are reappearing under other rubrics — but I can’t help feeling we are seeing world-historical forces clashing over information control right before our eyes.

(Cross-posted, in large part, from the Blown to Bits blog.)

  September 6, 2010 at 9:24 pm   Posted in: Criminal Law, First Amendment, Symposium (Future of Internet)   Print This Post   6 Comments

Online Symposium: Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet–And How To Stop It

posted by Danielle Citron

It’s an honor to introduce Jonathan Zittrain and the participants in our online symposium on The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It. From tomorrow through Wednesday, we will be discussing Zittrain’s important book, which warns of a shift in the Internet’s trajectory from a wide-open Web of creative anarchy to a series of closed platforms that will curtail innovation.  As  Zittrain predicted, “tethered appliances” dominate our information ecosystem today.  We increasingly trade generative technologies like PCs that permit experimentation for sterile, reliable appliances like mobile phones, video game consoles, and book readers that limit or forbid tinkering.  Zittrain attributes this phenomenon to the unfortunate, yet now predictable, pathologies that generativity enables.  Although generative technologies facilitate innovation, they permit the spread of spam, viruses, malware, and the like.

According to Zittrain, the Internet is at a crucial inflection point.  Rather than sustaining the wide-open Web of creativity and disruption, the Internet may in time become a series of controlled networks that limit innovation and enable inappropriate governmental and corporate surveillance.  Zittrain offers various strategies to forestall such scenarios, including tools to empower users to solve problems that drive users to sterile appliances and networks.  Zittrain argues that our information ecology functions best with generative technology at its core.

The Future of the Internet raises a host of fascinating and timely questions. Is the future of the Internet indeed bleak?  As this month’s cover story for Wired asks: is Zittrain’s dark future only likely in the “commercial content side” of the digital economy?  Might a healthy balance of generative technologies and tethered appliances emerge, or is the move to appliancized networks a grab for control that will be difficult to shake?  Will non-generative technologies impact our democratic commitments and cultural values?  Should we remain committed to protecting generativity?  Are there alternative strategies for preserving innovation besides the ones that Zittrain offers?

To consider these and other issues, we have invited an all-star cast of thinkers:

Steven Bellovin

M. Ryan Calo

Laura DeNardis

James Grimmelmann

Orin Kerr

Lawrence Lessig

Harry Lewis

Daithí Mac Síthigh

Betsy Masiello

Salil Mehra

Quinn Norton

Alejandro Pisanty

Joel Reidenberg

Barbara van Schewick

Adam Thierer

My co-bloggers will join this conversation as well.  In a post in April 2009, co-blogger Deven Desai started our conversation about The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It.  Since that time, the wild-fire adoption of tethered appliances, iPod applications, iTunes, and the like have shown just how prophetic and important Zittrain’s book is.  We are excited for the discussion to begin.

  September 6, 2010 at 2:58 pm   Posted in: Administrative Announcements, Anonymity, Architecture, Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Privacy, Symposium (Future of Internet), Technology, Web 2.0, Wiki   Print This Post   4 Comments

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