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.'"

Comments

Save the internet with reefer

[Anonymous Coward]

once the internet gets the reefer madness, there'll be no stopping it.

Easy.

[313373_bot]

Keep any form of legislation out of it. Let it self-regulate. Sounds radical and utopian, but the opposite seems even worse, ineffective and ultimately pointless.

Re:Easy.

[suv4x4]

Keep any form of legislation out of it. Sounds radical and utopian, but the opposite seems even worse, ineffective and ultimately pointless.

I'd give a hand* to eradicate cybersquatters by legislation. Also we have a big spam/scammer problem.

Legislation isn't out of the question, it just has to be applied with discipline. The internet is in its "wild west" phase right now, but as can be seen in USA itself, this is not a phase that lasts forever.

---
*Ok, I'd not give a hand, but you get my point.

Re:Easy.

[CastrTroy]

I don't think we have problem with spam or scammers that we can fix with legislation. Firstly, with spam, I have seen more than 2 spam messages per day in my inbox for a long time. This is through using GMail's filtering as well as SpamAssassin. Filtering out spam can get pretty far on just software, or at least a lot further than you'd get through legislation. Telling people not to send spam (especially when it's only illegal in certain countries) wouldn't get people to stop sending it. Also with scammers, it's a problem with education of the users, not with legislation. If people are stupid enough to type their bank password into some third party site because of an email they got, then they need to be educated about why that is such a bad idea.

Re:Easy.

[rustalot42684]

Yeah, 'cause deregulation ALWAYS works. Yes, it works in some areas of the market.

"But what is there stopping someone from making their own, new ISP that does not prioritize certain traffic?"

The costs of starting a new telecommunications provider are huge. You would have to lay in all your own fibre-optic cable and build a new infrastructure from scratch. Face it: The costs of making a new ISP are so immense that only someone like Google or Yahoo would be able to do it, and even then it would be VERY risky. So you're stuck with the ones you have: Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time-Warner, etc, and in Canada, I have Bell or Rogers. Because new competition is virtually impossible, they have no reason not to charge more & in new ways.

Re:Easy.

[Planesdragon]

you're absolutey right. I mean, look at how quickly the meat packing industry cleaned up after The Jungle. Or how quickly the automobile industry rolled out seat belts and air bags to all their automobiles, even the cheap ones, just because it was a good idea.

Self-regulation is a fool's dream, moreso than industry by demand.

Re:Easy.

[CastrTroy]

Legislation through the organizations that handle domain registrations. This doesn't need to be dealt with at a criminal or government level. This is something that the internet can deal with on it's own, without incorporating the help of people in governments who don't understand the technology.

Re:Easy.

[ls -la]

The inherent problem with this is that you assume people in general are smart and rational.

Re:Easy.

[marsall_banana]

Cars all had seatbelts before regulation, the regulation was to force drivers to wear them.

Re:Easy.

[node 3]

Legislation through the organizations that handle domain registrations. This doesn't need to be dealt with at a criminal or government level. This is something that the internet can deal with on it's own, without incorporating the help of people in governments who don't understand the technology. How so? That's exactly how it is now, and there's no regulation for this whatsoever. What motivation *AT ALL* do the registrars have to not allow domain squatting? None. The incentive is *exactly the opposite*.

That's the problem with libertarian free-market fundamentalists. Sometimes the market promotes undesirable behavior. For example, the free market promotes theft and murder. We regulate those activities because they are deemed to be sufficiently undesirable. Domain squatting isn't as bad as murder, but is in some ways like theft (blocking a limited resource with little-to-no societal benefit from being used productively by someone else, hence "squatting"). If you deem it sufficiently undesirable, the only logical solution is regulation. You're far more likely to find results with government regulation than you will with voluntary free-market regulation.

For example, without the EPA, do you think the environment would be cleaner or dirtier than it is now?

Re:Easy.

[node 3]

To start putting any limits on this will undoubtedly inconvenience legitimate users while the sneaks just find a way around it. We saw this when we forced netsol to start enforcing .net regulations for their intended purpose. It just can't be done sorry. Ugh, of all the brain-dead arguments put forth by free-market fundamentalists, this is the most inane. It's the "if even one person can get away with breaking the law, the law is useless" argument.

Making murder illegal doesn't stop murder. Does that mean outlawing murder has not worked? That it "just can't be done sorry"? Of course not.

The question is, can there be a law which sufficiently addresses some issue, while not unreasonably infringing on individual liberty?

For example, a law which states an individual or a corporation (and all basic derivations of each) cannot own greater than 100 domains unless they can show that they make some form of use of them beyond placeholder or primarily ad-based pages? See how that's weighted *against* the innocent person who merely owns a handful (or few dozen!) defunct domains, but focuses directly on domain-squatters? See how it allows for an independent judgement to allow for people to own and use many domains, but stop those who try to weasel around the law?

Now, I know what you are thinking. Why can't someone just form multiple LLC's and buy 99 domains each? Tack into the law that if a person is directly affiliated with a net total exceeding 100 domains, they fall under the purview of the law. Or make forming additional companies to bypass the law illegal. This sort of loophole closing works for other laws.

You have no particular right to any specific name. What does this even mean? If I buy a domain, I have the right to it, unless I'm infringing on someone else's right.

First come first served may suck but it sucks less than any of the alternatives. I disagree. First-come first-served severely favors gaming the system and snatching up every word you can imagine. That's why it's so completely impossible to find a domain-name that isn't already taken.

Go ahead and try it. Most of the names you can come up with will just end up in some parked domain name.

Crisis? What crisis? I stopped at page one.

[Torodung]

The only crisis I see regarding the Internet is that a large percentage of its users and networks implement a fundamentally insecure operating system, and the overwhelming majority of the client side users that run that operating system do so as ROOT, because that was the default install.

That's a garbage in/garbage out (GIGO) proposal for the Internet.

Otherwise, I think the Internet can handle it. It is carefully maintained and I think we'll even solve the looming address space problem. It doesn't need "saving" from anything but predatory last mile carrier profiteer rail barons who want to choke it off at the access points for profit.

So, Mr. Zittrain, your basic premise is flawed.

Here's a brief for a future article: The crisis is not with the *Inter*net, it is with the networks themselves that are internetworked. They're not secure. That's a local crisis, on a user by user and network by network basis. No change to the Internet or its protocols can fix it. GIGO.

Discuss.

If that was what your article eventually discussed, I apologize for my prejudice, but I couldn't get past your "Chicken Little" premises and foregone conclusion that "the Internet" is somehow in the crisis you described.

--
Toro

Re:Hrm

[lexarius]

You think that ISPs would drop prices due to a reduction in costs? I want to live in this fantasy world of yours.

Re:About appliance-like locked down computers

[keithjr]

What could be done to reduce this problem : -Nothing. Things are going to worsen but there is probably nothing we can do. -Let OS vendors turn to trusted computing but that would destroy the power and usefulness of General Purpose computer for everybody. -Hope people will turn to easy-to use appliance like device.

Unfortunately, there is a fourth option: gross restrictions on internet traffic and application usage. This brute-force and lowest-order solution is the impetus for our conversation here. It means loss of net neutrality and the big companies vie for pieces of the online pie. What the public needs to know are that other options EXIST to secure the internet.

Simple, eloquent means of securing general purpose PCs from malware, viruses, and other online threats exist. But, as you said, Average Joe doesn't see them, and can be thus be easily convinced that locking down the internet will be just as effective.

Article link leads to a login page

[Animats]

The link to the article on Internet openness leads to a page where you have to agree to an EULA to read the article. Openness. Right.

Re:Hrm

[rhyder128k]

I think that ISPs will be quick to "protect" users from all of this dreadful offensive porn that could harm their users. Unfortunately, the form that this protection will take is to award themselves extra money... [cough] I mean... charge extra for porn channel access.

Re:About appliance-like locked down computers

[Anonymous Coward]

Back to the car and road analogy... Despite the various laws and regulations concerning roads and vehicular use, there ARE still crashes and drunk drivers that Joe Average can't avoid. Thus there should be a set of laws to govern against phishing, malware, spyware, adware, and spam and there should be some way to enforce them, and make sure they pay. Joe Average gets in a wreak and he goes to a mechanic after settling the matter, through a court case if need be, to fix the car up. Joe Average should also, if he ever got his PC infected with malware and after setting the matter with the malware provider, through a court case if need be, he should go to a Computer Specialist to get his PC all fixed up. Also, the roads are public save for specific pieces that are not accessable at all or require a toll... The internet as of now is public save for specific pieces that are not accessable at all or require a subscription. Describing net neutrality in terms of the rules of the road would be allowing various companies to have roads with different road signs, making driving very confusing and causing more crashes. Instead, we should help educate users on safe surfing practices.

Better than a EULA!

[Torodung]

It's not a EULA. There is no licensure. There isn't anything to agree to, either, other than copyright law in general or their TOS/AUP if you're a subscriber. No license. No agreement.

It's simply a 189-word boilerplate statement about their commitment to copyright, and a statement of policy.

In the first paragraph, however, is the stand-out offer:

We therefore allow you to excerpt up to 500 words of an article for your personal use. This excerpt may be posted in your or another's blog or site, provided that it is accompanied by a link to the page on which the original article appears.

The way I read that is that HBR Online grants anyone who clicks "I accept" up to 500 words of limited personal republication rights, which is rights to exactly 500 more words than any other copyrighted publication. They simply ask that you link the full article in return.

Or you could accept no republication rights at all. Your choice.

So far from being a EULA, it's a concession. HBR Online is going to accept that small bloggers can't really use a "fair use" defense and is going to give them, beyond "fair use" coverage, limited rights in return for a link back. That is a good deal at a good price.

All I can say to HBR is, "Thank you." After a brief bit of reading I happily clicked "I accept."

Or as you said: "Openness. Right."

-- Toro