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

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.

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.