Jonathan Zittrain On the Future of the Internet

uctpjac writes "Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford and renowned cyberlaw scholar, gave a lecture explaining that the Internet has to be taken out of the hands of the anarchists, the libertarians, and the State, and handed back to self-policing communities of experts. If we don't do this, he believes the Internet will suffer 'self-closure' — the open system will seal itself off when the inability to put its own house in order leads to a take-over by government and business. The article summarizes Zittrain's points and notes, "Forces of organized interests that do not play by the rules, like malware peddlers, identity thieves and spammers are allowing another army of interests — corporate protectionists, often — to demand centralized, authoritarian solutions. This is the future of the Net unless we stop it.'"

Comments

I didn't get it.

[cyxxon]

Hm, article contains word blogosphere. Stopped reading there. And up to that word, I did not really get what "JZ" wanted to say anyway, it sounded more like an incoherent ramble by TFA's author. Anyone care to elaborate?

Re:another whiney Brit

[pandrijeczko]

PS. It's amazing how easy it is to avoid making a total ass of yourself if you spend a minute on Google to get your facts straight.

According to this "Harvard Unversity that just happens to be in the USA" link Jonathan Zittrain is a visiting professor at Oxford - it looks like he's just another "know-it-all" Yank after all.

Anarchism

[sohp]

Zittrain lost me on his own misuse of the word anarchist. Politically, an anarchist is someone who simply rejects a society controlled by a coercive state. This, of course, is exactly what his 'communitarian corner' supports. His taxonomy distorts the debate by relying on the pejorative use of anarchy as a term for moral and political disorder.

Re:Out of their hands and back again apparently

[Cal Paterson]

anarchy means no laws

I'm not sure this is true. Anarchy is generally agreed to mean the absence of government, and this is different from "no laws". Wikipedia agrees

Having a "self-policing community" means having laws.

Not true either. Anarchists (including prominent ones like Chomsky) have often put stated that their form of government does include rules, though I don't know enough about anarchism to state exactly what. One interview I've read is with Peter Jay and this includes some clarification about some anarchist views on the rule of law.

Anarchism is probably the most misrepresented of all political creeds, even more than fascism or communism. While I am certainly no expert (nor anarchist) you're putting forward statements that are clearly untrue, even at a glance.

That's okay

[Jane Q. Public]

Second Life is for people who don't have a First Life anyway.

Re:okaay

[ultranova]

That article sure uses a a lot of words to say 'the web should be communist'.

Communism is an economic system where the workers own the means of production; the practical implementations usually had the state owning everything. It has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

All analysis like these are missing a huge, huge point. The wider web may well end up under the control of powerful, agenda ridden groups. This isn't that important, no really, it isn't. They are trying to control something which is already on its way to being obsolete as a means to disseminate information between ordinary people.

Why not? Because the net will contain sub-internets within game worlds. sub-internets will be the new places to hang out. We may even see clones of our current Internet hosted entirely inside game worlds (or whatever game worlds become).

I use the Web mainly for reading text and looking at pictures. The current Web is absolutely superior in this compared to any imaginable virtual world.

The cyberspace - a simulation of real 3D world - is a fun thing for playing around, but when you need to get information, it is pathetically inefficient. Besides, it takes obscene amounts of resources to host a virtual world compared to simply hosting a website, so not surprisingly every virtual world in existence is tightly controlled by agenda-ridden groups. Add the fact that there is only a handful of them, and getting started in a new virtual world requires an absurd amount of effort - installing the client, at the absolute minimum - compared to simply going to a new website with the good old browser, and it is quite clear that the Internet's future lies in the lair of the spider queen.

Re:Libertarians are NOT "anarchists"!

[psychodelicacy]

Oh, come on! He's not saying that Libertarians = Anarchists, but that they have a similar place on the top-down/bottom-down and Hierarchical/Polyarchical system which he is using to analyse this issue. The types of Libertarians he's talking about are specifically those who live their cyber-lives outside communities. Some FOSS developers, for example, who prefer not to be associated with particular projects or communities. He's not saying that "quadrant" in his model is necessarily a bad thing, but that it doesn't have the same power as the communitarian model to help resist the shutting down of the internet by top-down governmental regulation.

If you read TFA, you might see the author's final comments on communitarianism - that it is a model which is built more on micro-institutions than hippy communes. This isn't a communist model, but one which asks for community expertise to be allowed to police net freedom rather than a totalising imposition of "solutions" from above.

Re:And Who Might The Experts Be?

[psychodelicacy]

I'm getting tired of saying this, but you're trash-talking someone who is well-respected and well-qualified, based on what someone else thinks he said! Look at Zittrain's biog - he's a principal investigator for the Open Net Initiative and closely involved with Chilling Effects. Do you really think that he's arguing against internet accessibility and freedom? Or is it more likely that the article's author has misinterpreted him?

Re:Band of experts == communism

[kesuki]

"ea, really. Name a famous hospital, one doing cutting edge work..... that isn't in the US"

name one eh? well these are only facilities doing STEM CELL Research mind you, but I removed all the US ones.

North America

U Toronto; Robarts Research Inst.; McMaster U, Ontario; Ottawa Health Research Institute

South America

U São Paulo
Instituto Nacional de Cardiologia Laranjeiras
U Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte
        United Kingdom & Republic of Ireland

Hammersmith Hospital, London; Imperial College London; King's College London
Medical Research Council (MRC); Regenerative Medicine Institute, Galway
Roslin Institute, Edinburgh; U Birmingham
U Cambridge; U College London
U Durham; U Edinburgh
U Glasgow; U Liverpool
U Manchester; U Newcastle
U Oxford; U Sheffield; U York

Continental Europe

Genopole, Evry, France; INSERM, Reims, France
IRB, Montpellier, France; U Valencia, Spain
Geneva U Hospitals, Switzerland; San Raffaele Scientific Institute, Italy
U Dusseldorf, Germany; U Cologne, Germany
Max-Planck Institute, Germany; Fraunhofer Institute, Germany
Hubrecht Laboratory, The Netherlands; Catholic U Leuven, Belgium
Norwegian Center for Stem Cell Research; Odense U Hospital, Denmark
U Goteborg, Sweden; U Lund, Sweden
Karolinska Institute, Sweden; Mendel U, Czech Republic
Oulu U, Finland; U Tampere, Finland
U Helsinki, Finland
        Mideast

Istanbul Memorial Hospital, Turkey; Hadassah Medical Center, Israel
The Technion, Israel; Jeddah BioCity, Saudi Arabia
Royan Institute, Iran
        Asia-Pacific

U Beijing, China; Peking Union Medical College
Stem Cell & Regenerative Medicine Ctr, Beijing; Shanghai Second Medical University
Chinese National Human Genome Center Shanghai; Shanghai Huashan Institute
Xiangya Reproduction & Genetics Hospital, China; Sun Yat-sen U, China
National Health Research Institutes, Taiwan; Biomedical Engineering Center, Taiwan
Seoul National U, Korea; Miz-Medi Medical Research Center, Korea
Maria Biotechnology Institute, Korea; Stem Cell Research Centre, Korea
RIKEN Institute, Japan; Kyoto U, Japan
Mitsubishi Kagaku Institute, Japan; Keio U, Japan
Osaka U Medical School, Japan; Genome Institute of Singapore
Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, Singapore
U Kebangsaan, Malaysia; Mahidol U, Thailand
NCBS Bangalore, India; National Centre for Cell Science, India
Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, India
        Australia

Australian Stem Cell Centre; Howard Florey Institute
Monash U Stem Cell Labs; Murdoch Childrens Research Institute
NSW Stem Cell Network; Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre
U Adelaide; U New South Wales
U Queensland; Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute

Re:No No No

[tomhudson]

To save others from looking around ...

http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=PI&s_site=philly&p_multi=PI&p_theme=realcities&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=0EB2A320ADE94F0E&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM

THE SYSTEM: "IT SERVES NO PURPOSE EXCEPT TO CONSUME ITSELF."

Source: Tim Weiner, INQUIRER WASHINGTON BUREAU

The United States is on the verge of building a Star Wars missile defense system. But the project's in-house critics say it has become a "feeding frenzy" of contractors building an expensive system of questionable worth. After nine years of research and $30 billion, with little to show for the time and money, Congress has ordered the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) to build something: an elaborate system of missiles, radars, command

Published on March 23, 1992, Page A01, Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA)

http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/dictionary/self_licking_ice_cream_cone/

self-licking ice cream cone n. a process, department, institution, or other thing that offers few benefits and exists primarily to justify or perpetuate its own existence. Also in the form self-licking lollipop.

The guy's name is "Johnny Zit-train." Sounds like a character out of a Clearasil commercial.