Zittrain 2008 - The Future of the Internet

From Inventiopedia

Zittrain, Jonathan (2008) The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It, London and New York: Allen Lane/Penguin Books. Available online from http://futureoftheinternet.org/.

A highly interesting book about "the generative net" and how it is threatened by new information appliances such as the iPhone (as opposed to, presumably, Google Android). And, most interestingly, some quite constructive suggestions for what to do about it (other than just promoting open source).

One of the most interesting premises of the book is that in order to fully understand the threat to the openness of the internet, it is not enough to just look at the network itself, one must also study the endpoints - by which Zittrain not only means the servers that stand at the edge of the network, but the terminals (PCs, mobile phones etc) that users actually use to connect to the internet. As the architecture of the internet, the end-to-end principle, pushes complexity to the edges, users - which no longer are the technical-savvy users of the early net, but rather you and me and everybody's uncle - find themselves faced with larger complexity than they want, including malicious code of all kinds. And so users may actually want more lock-down and less freedom, in return for more reliable services and systems. And so the challenge is: How to make life easier for the users, so they don't vote with their feet in favour of more lockdown and control over the network?

Zitthrain offers a compelling analysis and some interesting suggestions for solutions, ranging from legal innovations to technical ones. One central term is 'verkeersbordvrij', from a dutch traffic experiment where removing traffic rules paradoxically lead to increased safety. The general idea is: How to improve safety without excessive regulation?

--Anders Sundnes Løvlie 11:59, 7 October 2008 (UTC)