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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.'"
porn exploits new technologies. it invests in nothing.
Personally, and IMHO, as long as everyone is forced to keep to open standards, and as long as there are cheap and easy ways to access a network based on them, nobody can close anything off.
The Internet is (still) beyond the power of the individual or small group to control it. Put up a firewall? TOR springs up. Implement network throttling on certain types of traffic? That type of traffic will suddenly mimic other types. ISP locks you out due to political discomfort? You get another one who is willing to sell service at the same or lower price. Mandate locks and controls at the telco level? WiFi and NoCat springs up to build a mesh. Even Cuba, which has the tightest controls of any networked country, has one hell of a Sneakernet going on with geek sticks and covert data transfers... slow, but workable.
North Korea is about it for the ultimate Internet control, but only because they literally don't have an infrastructure installed, at least not outside of a few elite homes, palaces, and offices.
The closest anyone has come to a corporate-built 'walled garden' style of network was AOL (which had an "Internet" button to leave that network and get online). AOL's garden (in case no one noticed) is dead, and the corp is a mere shell of its former self.
To top all that off, corporations live and die by their customer base - the more locks they place on it, the less access they have to it.
Nope - I just don't see it happening anytime soon.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
It's worth realizing that we've solved most of the problems with hostile sites on the Internet other than ones that involve Windows zombies. Nobody is spamming from an identifiable source any more; that gets spammers turned off fast, or arrested. Spamming is now done using Windows zombies.
Hosting of scams tends to involve Windows zombies or server break-ins. We track this on our "Major domains being exploited by active phishing scams" list. Notice that almost all the sites with multiple exploits listed are services that provide DSL connectivity. The single-exploit sites are usually break-ins. Most of the open redirectors have been fixed, so that hole has mostly been closed.
The malware problem is, again, an endpoint problem, with programs given all the privileges of the user running them. Again, that's mostly a Windows problem. (Not that Linux is fundamentally better. Installs still typically have to be run as root. Few will run under a restrictive Secure Linux profile.) Of course, when Microsoft tightens things up, as they did minimally in Vista, people scream that their insecure apps won't run. Fixing the problem requires a clean start, like the OLPC. If the OLPC technology gets some traction at the high school, college, and road warrior level, we might have a way out of the current mess.
Once we get past outright criminality, we're faced with the "bottom-feeders" - the Made for Adwords sites, the "landing pages", the directory sites, the typosquatting sites, the domain parks, and similar annoying dreck. We're doing our bit to choke that off. If you're willing to lump the bottom-feeders together with the crooks, it's easier to separate them from the sites with some degree of legitimacy.
Most of the bottom-feeders get their revenue from Google's advertisers, via Google. Google is starting to do something about this with "landing page quality measurement". Their standards are very low, though, judging by what's still showing up in AdWords ads. (We have a free Firefox browser extension that rates AdWords advertisers, so we have a way to look at this. Advertiser quality varies drastically by site: advertisers on Bloomberg look legit, LinkedIn, mostly OK, Myspace, mostly bottom-feeders.)
There's a basic question here - how much of Google's revenue comes from bottom-feeders? Google recently tightened up their landing page standards, and Google's revenue dropped for the first time ever. Can Google still afford "don't be evil"? We'll find out this year.
All of these things are endpoint problems. Down at the IP level, we're doing OK.
You want to understand the impact of replicators?
Ralph Williams' short story from 1958 "Business As Usual, During Alterations" throws buckets of cold water on the whole idea.
In Williams' world anyone can copy an Eames chair, the Calder mobile, but only one man can design it and only one shop can produce the master. In Williams' world, intellect and creativity remains scarce and valuable.
> Jono's quite right: frame it in this context - who would you put in charge of managaing, say, the Linux kernel?
The linux kernel and the whole Linux ecosystem around it are interesting. But it is a single incident and it is unwise to attempt drawing too many conclusions from it. At best it is an example of 'getting a good king.' Everyone realizes that a good king is the best form of government possible, the problem with monarchy has always been in the method of selecting a king. For counter examples from the Free Software world one one need look no farther than the GNU Hurd fiasco.
Linux is an odd system. You have the benevolent dictator for life, but you also have the bluest of blue chip corporations up to their butts in development, working alongside hippies, anarchists and libertarians in peace and relative harmony. Lets wait until the socialogists write a few more PhD dissertations on this whole mess before we try to use it as a basis for a government, ok?
Democrat delenda est