Slashdot Mirror
How to Save the Internet
An anonymous reader writes "An article up at the Harvard Business Review's website by Jonathan Zittrain, one of the founders of the Berkman Center, discusses how the desire to clamp down on Internet openness can be avoided. From the piece: 'Those who provide content and services over the Internet have lined up in favor of "network neutrality," by which ISPs would not be permitted to disfavor certain legitimate content that passes through their servers. Similarly, those who offer open APIs on the Internet ought to be application neutral, so all those who want to build on top of their interfaces can rely on certain basic functionality. Generative systems offer extraordinary benefits. As they go mainstream, the people using them can share some sense of the experimentalist spirit that drives them.'"
Everyday, I fill up a jar with a little piece of the internet. Right now, my house is full of jars, but I figure this will pay off once the internet is gone.
I'm here to save your internet!
"If enough Internet users begin to prefer PCs and other devices designed along the locked-down lines of tethered appliances, that change will tip the balance in a long-standing tug of war from a generative system open to dramatic change to a more stable, less-interesting system that locks in the status quo."
DRM Hurra, for making the Internet more stable and people less free.
Now a bit more serious, that's still a single point of failure, the closed devices that, if compromised, none may notice or easily recover.
People still crack Xbox, blue-ray, even being closed devices, because they see a value on it, but what's the value of cracking an Ipod ?
Low price and marketing (deadlines) will continue to be the focus of big companies, not reliability and security, although the working environment will be more predictable.
And PCs won't die before TV Sets do, which I mean both will coexist with new (more things to sell) technology.