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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.
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.
^[:q!
I'm here to save your internet!
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
Lets face it: the internet is a mockery of what it was meant to be. It is full of literally crap and is subject to the whims of politically oriented morons. If the internet was redesigned, there would be a chance to restart: a chance to redesign the net to suit what is best, without idiotic interference. The issue of net neutrality would come up, but with a redesign that works around it, there would be no problem. Think: a new chance to fix all the ridiculous errors and issues and clean up the internet through a redesign.
The article is interesting, long but interesting. The author is arguing among other things that PCs should stay mainstream because they are a motor of innovation since they are easily adapted to new applications. The author sees closed appliances such as tivos as a danger to innovation.
I too believe that PC are extremely important in our society. But I am not sure that the generalization of locked down internet-appliance would be a bad thing.
The main reason we are assaulted by spam and that botnets are rampant is that the average user is ignorant. A computer is a great tool and it's a very powerful one but as the other said "with power comes responsibility". But for a large portion of the users, the computer is a tool, that they use for a rather limited set of applications, and they have no deep understanding of how it works and what they have to do to use it properly : we can see that in the inability of so many to secure their computers.
To use the sacrosanct car analogy, computers are like cars that you can drive without license. Since you don't need a license, people don't bother learning how to operate it properly : they are not interested and I can understand that. The problem is that now computers are interconnected and interact with others computers the same as cars interact with other cars on the road. You could very well operate your car without learning anything other than how to turn it on and accelerate but in that case, it is required that every drivers learn how to use turning light and other things before they can go on the road so that they don't impact the welfare as the other users.
On the other hand, I'm sure that , those problems will be reduced in the future as children that have been brought up around computers and the internet will be more computer literate than their parents but the general level of computer illiteracy I see around me makes me think that it will take a long long time before the average joe can be trusted with a computer.
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.
I think we are indeed seeing that on a level : we can already find appliance-like locked down computers in many houses : tivos, xbox, playstation, they all are lockdown computers. Not everybody need a PC and I think it would be good if people had the choice not to get a real PC if they don't have the skills to use it.
You think that ISPs would drop prices due to a reduction in costs? I want to live in this fantasy world of yours.
"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.
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.
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.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
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