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How to Save the Internet

Posted by Zonk on from the internet-man-to-the-rescue dept.

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.'"

4 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Easy. by 313373_bot · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Easy. by Planesdragon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Easy. by ls+-la · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  2. Crisis? What crisis? I stopped at page one. by Torodung · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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