The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It

Will future gadgets be the “face of big brother”? Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Oxford Internet institute, published a book entitled The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop it. The online version of the book is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 license and can be downloaded here.

In this book, Zittrain worries about whether the Internet can survive the freedom that produced it. Its openness is a reason why it spreads beyond nerds and their friends, in order to let other people exploit the space later on. In the beginning, there was a general purpose machine (PC), which was only restricted by its hardware limitations and did not have locks to limit its usage to what is accepted by the manufacturer.

Nowadays, there are high-tech gadgets which usually have a better usability and are more seamless. But, on the other hand, they are also controlled by their manufacturer, which are free to introduce locks. This fact is illustrated in the introduction by taking the iPhone as an example of a gorgeous but restricted high-tech gadget. In order to design the phone as a more user friendly device, Apple is controlling everything running on it, in order to prevent people from uploading crap that will stop the phone from operating properly. The first version was not open to run any third-party software at all, which was relaxed later on. However, there is still the enforced limitation that third-party software cannot be exchanged directly between users. When Bob wrote a great software for security enabled Instant Messaging, he cannot give it directly to Alice but needs to share it on the iTunes Application store, run by Apple. Even though this is less restrictive than disallowing third-party software at all, Apple can still control what is run on the iPhone and kill every software that is not wanted and also government can enforce that. This is a difference to the general purpose machine we know as personal computer.

The Internet follows an innovation model that he calls the “two people in a room” model, which is different to the ones preferred in most enterprises. Metaphorically speaking, the two people in that imaginary room are hacking without following exact plans and even having a business plan or pre-defined milestones. This is different to the way CEO’s asked by Zittrain deal with innovation. In their models, people need to ensure that everything is planed ahead of time and well justified. But most of the interesting innovations in the last decades came from people who were not planing very far ahead.
Some people were working on KaZaA and wounded the music industry in more than a week. When they were done, they were about to take on the telecommunication industry and came up with Skype. This is the disruptive and unpredictable nature of the Internet as we know it. The question discussed in the book is how this might change in the future Internet.

Therefore, Zittrain gives a number of scenarios for the Internet of the future, where a plausible one is the “not with a bang, but with a whimper” scenario. In this scenario, we might end up in an ecosystem, where innovation takes place in the way known in many other industries; there is competition among a bunch of firms and, occasionally, they come up with something good. As Zittrain said in an interview with National Public Radio (NPR), he worries that, metaphorically, we end up with a technical elite class that swap files with each other and the mainstream will still have a narrow connection to that. The mainstream is using platforms where innovation is taking place very slowly and with the capacity to monitor and control very much.

Zittrain writes on page 5:

A lockdown on PCs and a corresponding rise of tethered appliances will eliminate what today we take for granted: a world where mainstream technology can be influenced, even revolutionized, out of left field. Stopping this future depends on some wisely developed and implemented locks, along with new technologies and a community ethos that secures the keys to those locks among groups with shared norms and a sense of public purpose, rather than in the hands of a single gatekeeping entity, whether public or private.

Although I did not finish reading the book yet, it appears to be well-written and worth reading for people interested in discussions on the future Internet.